How to make writing proposal win themes easy

Proposal win themes should articulate why you are the customer's best alternative, and do that from the customer's perspective. If you just think of them as the key messages or benefits, your win themes will tend to get watered down into what you think makes your company good instead of what the customer needs to realize in order for you to win. What makes proposal win themes so hard to write is that people show up unprepared to articulate why they are the customer's best alternative.

When you bid an opportunity simply because you discover that the client is accepting proposals from anyone and you decide to give it a shot, you start from zero when trying to articulate why the customer should select you.

It is even more difficult when the RFP tells you what to propose. When everyone is bidding the same thing, it becomes more price sensitive and people are afraid to go beyond the minimum needed to fulfill the requirements. You are left with no clear way to differentiate yourself from the competition and no competitive advantage.

Sometimes this doesn’t show up until people try to write their proposal win themes. When you decide to bid before you can articulate what it will take to win, it’s hard to figure out what to say in order to win. All you have to say is that you can deliver what the customer has asked for and that you have experience. But your competitors will say the same things, and they will say it better if they are better informed.

When you lack bid strategies, positioning, differentiation, and customer insight, all you can really do is talk about yourself and hope no one is better. If you do have proposal win themes they will tend to be claims, usually unsubstantiated. They will be about you instead of being about the customer or written from the customer’s perspective. They won’t help the customer determine that you are the best alternative, no matter how much you want to win or how big and full of bold claims you make them.

It will feel like you’re struggling with writing the proposal, and you may conclude that proposal writing is hard or that you need to find better proposal writers. But the problem is not with proposal writing at all.

The problem with your proposal themes is not poor proposal writing

A good bid/no bid decision reflects your win strategies. A bad bid/no bid decision leads to bidding without a competitive advantage. If you are:

• Struggling to identify your win strategies
• Having trouble identifying win themes to emphasize in your proposal
• Unable to differentiate yourself from the competition
• Hopeful instead of confident

The real problem may be what you are bidding instead of how you are writing about it. You should examine your bid/no bid system instead of just treating the symptoms.

When you sit down to write a proposal that aligns with your strengths, differentiators, customer insights, and your company's strategic plans, then your value proposition and competitive positioning flow naturally. Instead of trying to discover some elusive proposal win themes, you just have to articulate the alignment that’s already there. That’s a much more solvable problem, and the themes that result are more effective and authentic.

This is how a good bid/no bid system results in a higher win rate. It's not simply because being more selective means you only bid opportunities that you have a better shot at winning. It's because the selection process points you to the win strategies that will enable you to write proposals with a much higher win probability, and because you know how to go beyond claims of greatness and prove why you are the customer's best alternative.

Winning proposals consistently isn't about somehow finding a clever way to present yourself so that you stand out. Consistently winning proposals comes from having a story to tell that the customer wants to be a part of. That story will position you against your competition, include your win strategies, and show insight about the customer's needs. If you can't say these things verbally before you start your proposal, they won't somehow appear as a result of proposal writing.

When you only bid opportunities that relate to your corporate strategies and where you have a competitive advantage, you start the proposal already knowing what story you need to tell. Then the proposal effort becomes about making your story stronger and not about trying to figure out a story to tell.

If you can't articulate what makes you the customer's best alternative, you can’t write a winning proposal and therefore you shouldn’t bid. But more importantly, if you can't articulate why you are the customer's best alternative in a way that's compelling, it’s probably because you have no positioning or differentiation.

If your only reasons for bidding are because you can do the work or "have experience," that's a bad sign. You shouldn’t bid if your only bid strategy is figuring out a clever way to make it sound like you’re not ordinary. That simply isn't competitive. 

If you are not ordinary, writing proposal win themes should be easy. If they aren’t, it’s a no bid indicator. Don't wait until you get in the middle of the proposal to realize it. But if you do, take it as an indicator that you haven't done your pre-proposal homework. You haven't shown up prepared to win.