Ask The Expert

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!

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