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The backbone of your winning bid strategy

In the high-stakes arena of bidding, a well-structured strategy is your greatest ally, ensuring each phase of the process builds upon the last to create a foundation for success.

In the competitive world of bidding, understanding the distinct phases of the bid lifecycle is crucial. Each phase or key activity acts as a vertebra in the backbone of your strategy, providing the necessary support to stand tall and succeed. Without these connections comes a lack of consistency and inefficiency, and a campaign that's likely to result in an unsuccessful proposal.

Capture phase:

It all starts with a strong capture phase. This sets the tone for the entire process, like the base of the spine, it captures and analyses customer's needs, aligns them with your capabilities and your competition, to enable you to develop a solution and value proposition, underpinned by a customer engagement strategy to gather intelligence, test ideas and influence. A well-executed capture phase ensures a solid foundation for the subsequent stages.

Qualification

After the initial pursuit decision, we scrutinise opportunities and work out how winnable they are. We ask: is it real, can we do it, do we want it, can we win it? This is much easier if we understand if we have the complete picture of the opportunity which can only truly be provided from effective capture.

Win strategy

With a qualified opportunity in hand, you can develop your win strategy, knowing that it's based on facts or at least documented assumptions (which need to be tested). Here, you develop a robust strategy that will get you to your bidding goals, usually to win. This of course has to be built on and connected to the information captured in the process to date. It's about crafting a tailored approach that resonates with the client and differentiates you from the competition. If the backbone isn't there, the strategies sitting behind the win strategy won't have a leg to stand on.

Proposal strategy

With a clear win strategy in place, you can translate it into a proposal strategy that guides the development of your written and oral responses. Defining your key messages, themes, and value propositions (that will convince the customer that you are their best choice) requires real clarity on the customer, their requirements and proposal needs, your solution, and the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. Without a strong backbone, your proposal strategy won't have the strength to withstand your customer's scrutiny.

Proposal development

With a solid proposal strategy bolstering your opportunity, you can start developing your proposal. Here, you follow the best practices of proposal writing but if you haven't developed an effective strategy then you cannot create winning content. That's content that goes beyond answering the question and showing compliance but shows genuine customer empathy and valuable solutions that clearly demonstrate why you and not the competition wrapped up in a solid story.

Learning reviews

And when you celebrate the win or commiserate in the loss, you need to review what happened. Lessons learned (not logged) should be captured at the top end of our backbone. These reviews are opportunities to continuously improve your approach. They foster a culture of learning and adaptation, ensuring that each bid is stronger than the last.


Winning can feel like back breaking work. Especially if you're missing some key vertebrae. By understanding each phase, activity and interconnectivity, you ensure that the backbone of your bid is robust and resilient, ready to support your winning proposal.

We help our clients to connect these dots on specific opportunities and build teams with strong backbones. To find out more take a look at how we help our clients win bids here and also how we help them to build capabilityhere.

To find out more about the key skills and tools necessary to develop powerful, compelling proposals contact our experts on 0800 009 6800 or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.


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