Identifying Themes For Your Proposal
Win strategies and themes provide the customer with a reason to select you. If you do not communicate them to your writers, the proposal will not be written to substantiate them.
- You should distribute a copy of your win strategies and themes that you want your writers to substantiate.
- You can use this form to help identify them.
You should prepare a list of theme statements before the RFP is released so that your plans reflect your win strategies. Once the proposal is released, you should prepare a new list to allocate your theme statements to the RFP and proposal outline and see whether you have any gaps (both in themes and in win strategies). Having this list will make planning your content easier, because when you need to insert your themes you will already know what they are.
You can approach writing theme statements from several different directions.
- By the proposal outline so that your theme statements provide full coverage of the RFP, are related to each other, and establish a hierarchy from the highest level to the lowest level.
- By the topic so that your theme statements address what matters. See “Topics for Themes” for suggestions.
- By the RFP so that your theme statements can be scored and reflect the customer’s requirements and evaluation criteria.
- By competitor or type of competitor so that you can articulate why they should pick you instead of them.
Access to premium content items is limited to PropLIBRARY Subscribers
A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks hundreds of premium content items including recipes, forms, checklists, and more to make it easy to turn our recommendations into winning proposals. Subscribers can also use MustWin Now, our online proposal content planning tool.
