How to Win Proposals Using the Shipley Proposal Process
With historically low win rates and a time-consuming process, proposals are a despised necessity for most companies. Fortunately, there are approaches and standards that you can use to increase your win rates and make responding to proposals more enjoyable. One way to do this, is by implementing the Shipley Process as part of your business and proposal development life cycle.
What is the Shipley Process?
The Shipley Process is the full cycle marketing and sales lifecycle, which includes proposal development, as defined by Shipley Associates. Founded in 1972, Shipley Associates is recognized as the leader in proposal development, and their approach is used by leading organizations, including Fortune 100 companies.
The Shipley Process provides a comprehensive approach to acquiring clients with a solid strategy and tactical execution at each stage. By using the Shipley Process, your company will be better positioned to attract, convert, and retain clients.
Proposal Process Overview
The proposal development portion of the Shipley Process falls near the end, but even if you haven’t been using the process for the first portion, you will benefit from implementing the following for proposals.
Pre-Proposal Work
It is ideal that you have time to prepare for an RFP before it is released. If that is the case, you should hold a Blue Team Review and a Black Hat Review.
What is a Blue Team Review?
The Blue Team Review is focused on reviewing the capture plan and developing a win strategy for the proposal. If you don’t have a dedicated capture team, this work may fall to your sales or business development team. The ultimate goal of this meeting is to develop an understanding of the best approach to win the proposal. This means discussing key requirements for the customer, how they are evaluating responses, and your company’s key approach.
What is a Black Hat Review?
A Black Hat Review meeting is all about competition. During this meeting, you’ll try to predict the solutions of your most common competitors (or those who you know will be responding to the RFP). Once you develop this, you can begin to frame your competitive positioning to incorporate throughout your proposal and . walk away with a few key points of differentiation.
However, if you don’t find out about the RFP until it’s released, you can complete these at the beginning of the project, but the timeframe will be shortened, and they may need to be combined into a single meeting.
Proposal Development
Proposal Management
If you have a team responding to your proposal, it is important to designate one person who will manage the master proposal and monitor the progress of proposal development. By having a proposal manager, you increase the likelihood that your team will create content early instead of waiting until the last minute, which would result in poorer quality content.
Pink Team Review
Early in the proposal development process, you should hold a Pink Team Review. A Pink Team can be thought of as a strategy brainstorming session for your proposal. Here you will develop storyboards, key themes, and a win strategy for your proposal. Depending on the complexity of the proposal, this can occur in one or several meetings to address the complexity of your proposal. Pink Teams typically result in new content or graphics that need to be created to include in the proposal.
Proposal Drafting
After the Pink Team, you will focus on creating a draft of the proposal. This portion of the process is focused on gathering, creating, and revising content. Here you will hold several status calls and subject matter expert interviews to ensure progress is made on the proposal.
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Green Team Review
A Green Team Review is focused on reviewing near-final pricing. During this meeting, you will compare your proposed pricing against what you are actually proposing in the non-price sections of your proposal to ensure everything is included in the price. The Green Team can be held either before or after the Red Team, depending on when your company finalizes your solution and pricing.
Red Team Review
The Red Team Review is where a team reviews the proposal as if they were the evaluation committee. Here, you will create a scoring sheet based on the evaluation criteria from the RFP (if applicable) and walk through the proposal to improve effectiveness. It is best practice to include at least one person (or more if possible) in this meeting who has had no prior experience with the proposal. This person will serve as an objective evaluator. The Red Team will often lead to new content to be created, elimination of a few sections of unrelated content, and possible formatting changes.
Gold Team Review
A Gold Team Review is essentially a final review to confirm everything from the Green and Red Team reviews have been completed. This meeting results in either final changes to be made or final approval of the proposal materials for submission.
Post-Submittal
White Hat Review
After submitting the proposal, you should hold a White Hat Review to debrief on what worked and what did not in the proposal process. This may result in research to be conducted to develop a better competitive position, new proposal content to be added to the library, or process changes to streamline your response next time.
When to Use the Shipley Proposal Process
If this process seems overwhelming, don’t worry--you don’t have to follow every step! While Shipley recommends following all of these steps (and more) as part of your process, not every company has the need to implement all of these reviews for every proposal. For templates for the key meetings, use our Competitive RFP Key Meeting Templates!
Instead, you may choose to add these meetings to only your most high value, complex proposals. Or you might want to start incorporating one type of review into every proposal.
In general, most companies conduct a strategy review or discussion for every proposal, and the strict color team process is reserved only for the very important opportunities. You can use this process as inspiration to refine your approach to proposals.
If you’d like to learn a simplified version of the Shipley Process designed for small and mid-sized businesses, then check out our Bid to Win training!