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Jon Williams

Expertise:

Proposal Management & APMP Training Expert

Relevant Skills:

CPP APMP Fellow

Disclaimer Back to experts

Jon is the Managing Director of Strategic Proposals. He and his team work with clients worldwide to help them establish winning proposal capabilities and to capture major deals. He has built and led numerous bid and proposal centres; managed, reviewed and benchmarked countless proposals; worked in over thirty countries; and trained over 10,000 course participants.

An award-winning writer and trainer, Jon was APMP UK’s first chief executive in 2001/2. He is a Fellow of the association, holds APMP Professional status and (as an APMP Approved Trainer) has helped over 2,500 candidates to achieve certification. He’s also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and of the Institute of Professional Sales.

Achievements / experience:

  • Started his career in procurement, before moving into the proposal profession in 1999.
  • Served as a board director of PMMS, the leading strategic procurement consultancy, for five years.
  • Set up and managed Compaq’s Strategic Bid Centre in 1999-2001, radically increasing win rates.
  • Numerous industry accolades include APMP UK’s People Development award for three consecutive years (with Capita, Vodafone and WSP) and APMP’s global Leadership and Insight Awards. Finalist, UK Sales Trainer of the Year 2015.
  • Winner of the APMP Founder’s Award, the highest award in the bid and proposal profession, in 2020.
  • Co-author (with BJ Lownie) of the ‘Proposal Guys’ blog, and of the bestselling book ‘Proposal Essentials’ (2013) and its sequel ‘Passionate About Proposals’ (2018).
  • Regular keynote speaker at conferences worldwide, and author of numerous thought-leading articles and white papers.
  • Leadership so far in his career of teams that have captured over £20bn of business, with a win rate in excess of 85%.

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Bidding Quarterly Contributions

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  1. The 3 Cs of Proposal Strategies

Recent Questions

Measuring Bid Team Success

Hi Jon, as we set our objectives for 2018, I am pondering how best to measure bid team success over the course of the coming year, and I wondered whether you might have any thoughts on this? It’s all very well looking at win rates, however these can only be as good as the pre-preparation that goes into each bid (i.e. capture planning) and the bid/no-bid decisions made at executive level. Where capture planning is not entrenched as standard company procedure, and where bid opportunity qualification is not as rigorous as it could be in weeding out unwinnable opportunities, is it fair to measure a bid team’s effectiveness in terms of their win rates – and if not, what other measures are appropriate?

I’ve already had some interesting feedback from other industry experts but this is the first time I’m sharing my question here on the Bid Hub; look forward to hearing back!

Many thanks

Nicola

Answered by Jon Williams Disclaimer

How to use active language while still making the customer the subject of the proposal

Jon,

I use your Proposal Essentials book on a daily basis and absolutely love it.

One of the guidelines is using the customer’s name/You/Your etc on the left-hand side of the page – if I’m doing this, I sometimes end up using passive language though, which is generally a no-no.

How do you use active language while keeping the customer as the focal point of the sentence/paragraph please (without reverting to phrases like ‘You’ll benefit from…’, ‘You’ll receive…’ etc?

Thank you!

Answered by Jon Williams Disclaimer
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