Blog · Tag
shipley.
14 posts in this archive.
Section 2: the technical approach without jargon buildup
Why almost every technical approach section opens with the wrong sentence, what the right opening looks like, and a rewritten example from a real bid. The jargon buildup that kills evaluator attention in the first paragraph.
Executive summaries: the shortest high-leverage document in B2B sales
The canonical pillar on executive summaries. Why one page decides whether the proposal gets read, the five parts of a strong exec summary, two before-and-after rewrites, who signs off.
The RFP kickoff, the 30-minute version
For small teams where a 90-minute Shipley kickoff is a non-starter. The trimmed agenda, what gets kept, what gets pushed to async, and the one artifact the kickoff still has to produce.
The minimum viable capture plan
Four questions, one table. Why most capture plans collapse under their own weight, and the stripped-down version small and mid-size teams actually use.
Color-team review: the full playbook
The operational companion to our color-team essay. Step-by-step procedures for pink, red, gold, and white teams — when to run each, who attends, the rubrics they apply, and the templates that make the discipline portable.
The five compliance-matrix mistakes that lose bids
Real patterns from real debriefs. The matrix mistakes that surface as scoring penalties on the buyer side, and the discipline that prevents each one. Citations to VisibleThread on the most common cause.
The color-team review discipline, explained for modern teams
Pink, red, gold, white. The four-team review discipline most modern proposal shops know by name and don't actually run. This post reclaims it — what each team is for, why teams skip it, the rubrics, and how to run reviews async in 2025.
A field guide to win themes that actually win
The canonical pillar on win themes. What they are, what they aren't, the swap-name test applied across six worked examples, and the discipline of constructing themes from capture and retiring themes that didn't earn their score bump.
The complete bid/no-bid scoring framework
The canonical bid/no-bid framework. Five variables scored 1–5, weighting, the rubric template, the bid-decision meeting, override discipline, and where the rubric is honestly wrong.
Reading an RFP like the procurement lead who wrote it
RFPs are procurement documents written by named humans with known constraints, drafted from templates reused for fifteen bids. Read them that way and the response writes itself differently. The canonical long version.
The RFP kickoff meeting that saves two weeks
A 60-minute kickoff that decides ownership, win themes, the compliance scaffold, and the review calendar. Run badly, it costs you two weeks. Run right, it pays for itself by Friday.
The APMP BOK 2025 update, decoded
The APMP Body of Knowledge is the closest thing the proposal profession has to a canonical text. Here's what it covers, how it has evolved, and where the 2025 update sits relative to the practice — based only on what's public.
Win themes and the swap-name test
If you can swap your company name with a competitor's and the win theme still makes sense, the win theme is fluff. Six examples of themes that fail the test, six that pass, and what evaluators actually score.
The 8-stage RFP response pipeline, explained
A canonical long-read on how a mature proposal shop actually moves an RFP from the hand-off email through submission and the post-mortem that feeds the next bid. Eight stages, what each one owns, and where each one fails.
See the proposal workflow
Take the 5-minute tour, then start a trial workspace when you're ready to run a real pursuit against your own source material.