In the 15 years that we’ve enabled organisations to benchmark their bid capability, this subject (standard style and content) has pretty much always come out bottom of the list of things that need fixing. The question we ask people to answer is simple…
How consistent is the ‘house style’ and standard content (capability statements and supporting information) used in proposals and presentations?
They are offered five answer choices, with the following one being the ‘mid-ground’ or ‘acceptable’ answer, i.e. there is scope to improve, but this is OK…
“A corporate ‘house style’ is documented and followed, supported by a central library of appropriate, easily accessible, and up-to-date capability statements and supporting information that writers feel confident in using when developing customer-focused proposals. Feedback from customer is also positive.”
As I stated earlier, most people agree that their organisation could be described as the above, or better. Could you say that about your organisation?
The big challenge for most organisations trying to hit level of capability stated above is the ‘up-to-date’ aspect. Organisations are constantly changing, so keep pre-written content around capabilities can be a real struggle, requiring dedicated resource in most cases. The UK APMP acknowledge this, awarding the Fiona Flower Memorial Award every year to the people who they judge to have done this the best.
Good content management drives the ‘easily accessible’ element above, and there are numerous software tools on the market to enable this. I googled ‘content management proposals’ and got this site back – a good list of possible solutions – http://www.capterra.com/proposal-management-software/ – is worth a look.
So, how good is your organisation at doing this?