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Hunting involves many decisions and steps before you actually take a shot. These preliminary steps prepare a hunter to experience the most success. Similarly, when a business is just starting out, you must be on the hunt for opportunities that will sustain your organization.

Bid decisions are decisions gate reviews triggered by ongoing customer or opportunity intelligence. The opportunity manager (or capture manager) along with management determines whether to advance, defer, or end the pursuit. The decision hinges on whether you have the capability or can obtain the resources to pursue and subsequently capture an opportunity that meets your business objectives.

The RFP can be scary for a lot of reasons. The stress and pressure to deliver a winning response might feel like too much to handle...

Executive Summaries are often the most important sections in a proposal. They set the tone for individual evaluators and are sometimes the only pages read by the decision makers.

Storyboards and Mockups are planning tools used to develop and review new content before writing text. Like any tool, they should save time and improve quality to justify their use...

Some best practices in proposal writing, improve your writing and your win rate by applying these seven rules

Planning before writing saves more time than it takes. In parallel with ongoing capture planning activities, plan and validate your proposal plan before you begin writing new material or tailoring reuse material.

A cycle is a progression through a series of stages leading to a desired result. In business development, the lifecycle is about winning business. You’re not winning just any business, but business that is sustainable and profitable that helps the organization meet its objectives.

When measuring business development success, it’s not about the process—it’s about winning. Winning means outscoring your opponent. How you get there is less important than getting there.

The quality and competitiveness of a proposal depend on a number of criteria. How well did you comply with the customer’s bid instructions? How did you respond to the requirements and issues that drove the procurement? ...

How you propose your solutions to the customer can give your company a competitive edge.

Graphics are one of the most effective ways to persuade the customer to select your solution. Graphics convey both facts and emotion, equally important aspects of effective persuasion. Effective graphics improve evaluator retention and understanding.

Value propositions establish customer value based on the business relationship. They describe how the seller’s solutions will improve the customer’s business and how that improvement with be measured. Value propositions are opportunity and customer specific and are developed collaboratively with the customer throughout the pursuit cycle...

One of the best parts of seeing a massage therapist is having all the knots worked out of a particularly sore spot. However, if you have an appointment and the massage therapist spends the entire time rubbing ...

The Proposal Management Plan (PMP) documents the roles, responsibilities, tasks, schedules, and deadlines before contributors start developing proposal sections, volumes, and ultimately the complete proposal. The plan becomes the “evergreen” guide to keep the team on track and accountable.

In the current work climate, telecommuting is increasingly more common, and virtual proposal teams are on the rise. Having team meetings and completing tasks via electronic interactions does not change your goal of preparing a winning proposal. It simply changes the mode of communication and increases the need for clarity.

Are you wasting money on proposals? Did you know you may be wasting money on proposals? Many things can be draining your proposals of value and earnings.

Few things damage a proposal faster than poor writing. This doesn’t just mean just watching out for misspelled words and improper grammar. There are other things to consider when crafting your proposals.

To write proposals effectively, writers need a lot of information. They must know the customer, including their hot buttons, and they must know your bid strategy...this information is not always given to proposal writers, which makes the proposal development slow and confusing. Giving writers the necessary information and advising them what to do with it creates more winning proposals.

Capture Planning is the process of identifying the opportunities, assessing the environment, and devising and implementing winning strategies oriented toward capturing a specific business opportunity. Consistently successful capture planning requires a written, action-oriented capture plan.

Kickoff meetings are critical milestones that require careful core team planning followed by flawless execution. Good kickoff meetings inspire a team, poor ones can demoralize a team.

Writer’s block is a LIE.This is a lie we tell ourselves to feel better about our current circumstances. Giving the condition a diagnosis seems to calm us down or give us a reason for our fears, our inferiorities. Sure, this sounds real and the words feel blocked in our head, and they’re clearly not coming out onto the page. So what else could it be?

Compliance and responsiveness are often confused, so let’s discuss the definition of each. Proposals can be responsive but not compliant, or compliant but non-responsive.

From tailored workshops to experienced Shipley consultants, the ways for Shipley to help you win business are endless.