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Business Winning Tips
June 1, 2020

Color Team Reviews

Color team reviews are business development milestones at which experts and managers work to improve the win potential of pursuits. Done correctly, they are a cost effective way to improve the overall success of your capture planning and proposal development efforts.

Color Teams
July 14, 2020

Color Team Reviews—Who to Invite and Why

Most of us know how vital color team reviews are to ensuring a well-written, concise solution for our customers. But these reviews can get tricky and become ineffective if we’re not careful. During Shipley’s most recent webinar on color team reviews, we were asked many questions about how to hold effective reviews. But, by far, the most popular question was, “who do I invite?”The answer? It depends on the size, scope, and complexity of the pursuits as well as the size and mission of your organization. Color team reviews should be tailored to fit the environment and the pursuit size and complexity.

Business Winning Tips
June 5, 2019

Business Development Lifecycle

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.

Business Winning Tips
November 6, 2018

Business Winning Tip: Capture Planning

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.

March 27, 2024

Winning IDIQ Contracts

Bidding on large contract vehicles, including multiple-award IDIQs (for instance Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts [GWACs]) can be challenging and time-consuming for any organization...

Business Winning Tips
February 4, 2020

Capture Management

Capture (opportunity) management requires careful and precise execution of a well-developed capture plan. Developing the plan is important. Executing the plan is difficult but essential. Capture managers are generally made, not born. Most organizations develop capture managers internally as they gain awareness of company strategies for growth or market positioning. The capture manager is generally the primary person responsible for winning or losing opportunities and directs customer contact before, during, and after a proposal is submitted.

Writing
July 24, 2019

Seven Rules for Writing Winning Proposals

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

Business Winning Tips
August 21, 2019

Storyboards and Mockups

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...

October 12, 2021

Probability of Win: Mystery and Magic

Probability of Win (Pwin) remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in business development today...

Business Winning Tips
October 2, 2019

Bid Decisions

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.

Business Winning Tips
September 1, 2020

Proposal Strategy

A proposal strategy is a plan to write a persuasive, winning proposal that sets you apart from your competitors. Proposal strategy must align with the capture strategy in order to create win themes that tell the story...

Business Winning Tips
July 7, 2020

Developing Effective Theme Statements

Theme statements are not sales slogans, like the catchy phrases most commonly seen in consumer marketing. They are based on customer hot buttons and motivators.

March 10, 2018

Qualifying Opportunities—A Simple Framework

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.

Business Winning Tips
March 27, 2019

The Importance of the Value Proposition

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...