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Could an evaluator cut-and-paste your theme statement into the evaluation form to justify giving you the highest score for a factor or sub factor? Could your competitor make the same claim you are making in your theme statement? If you can’t answer “Yes” to the first question and “no” to the second, your theme statement needs improvement.

The role of business development (BD) and sales professionals is the same across all industries—to win business. The key difference between high performing BD professionals and organizations relative to their peers lies not in their ability to close deals, rather their ability to effectively qualify their pipeline opportunities. Most importantly, high performers know when to kill a low-probability opportunity and they get it out of their pipeline as quickly as possible.

When Shipley was founded in 1972 in the U.S., our clients largely focused on winning government and B2B competitions in the U.S. However, as U.S. clients expanded globally, they increasingly asked Shipley to support their non-U.S. operations. In response, Shipley established offices around the globe, and now supports clients in local, regional, and international competitions.

A young man is determined to marry. Believing he would be a great catch, he prepares a PowerPoint briefing highlighting all he has to offer a wife. His very polished slide deck includes a lot of great photographs of himself, a detailed history of his childhood, education, and athletic awards. He includes his financial status, a picture of his apartment, and a list of his favorite foods, restaurants, and movies. The slide deck expands as he thinks of ever more things a potential bride would like to know about him.

This is one of the most common questions in our industry. The funny thing is most people and organizations want to create all sorts of complex dynamics, conspiracy theories, dreams, fables, and excuses as to why their proposals fail to win and why their win rates and capture ratios are so low. I have now been doing proposals, capture, and business development work in the Federal space for 39 years. The reasons for having a really poor win rate have not changed in that time because humans have changed very little in that time. So, if you want to stop making excuses and get on the right path to winning, I have a few easy suggestions for you to change the dynamic.

I am sure many of you have heard that a good Technical Volume response gets you “in the door” during a source selection, but the Cost Volume turns that response into a winner. During the creation of the Technical Volume, we as offerors, try to ensure the customer understands how that technical response brings value (value propositions) to them. We do that by stressing how we bring benefits through lower cost, improved schedule, better quality, lower risk, and enhanced performance: things they value. However, in many cases when we get to the Cost Volume, we focus only on spreadsheets and numbers and not how that “bottom line” brings value to them. We must ensure that the Cost Volume reflects what the value(s) are tied back to that Technical Volume.

Winning a task order master contract is not easy! Typically, many people have worked many hours (and many after-hours) to help our organization win this master contract. So, on Contract Award Day, we plan and host an excellent Victory Party attended by everyone who contributed to the Big Win. We introduce every contributor, we applaud every contributor, and we thank them with terrific food and drink.

I’ll never forget my first day in the proposal industry: My boss heaved a glossary of terms onto my desk and told me to read up. That’s what I spent the next 5 hours—okay, 3 days—doing. It still took weeks of hearing terms like “pink team,” “value proposition,” and “SWOT” in context before I began to understand what these words meant.

This is a common problem when moving into a new market space. Perhaps you’ve discovered the perfect product for the customer who needs it, but unless they know who you are and the quality your company is committed to, you may still risk losing the opportunity.

High-level readers of proposals, those either making or influencing the selection decision, often only skim proposals, looking at the graphics that stand out, then reading the captions, headings, highlight statements, and the executive summary. These readers must be able to see why you should be selected without reading any body text. If your proposal graphics are not leading the evaluator to key information, then they are missing the mark.