Blog · Tag
win-themes.
22 posts in this archive.
The win-theme retirement ceremony
A quarterly ritual: which win themes we stop using, and why. This quarter, three retired. One we kept against better judgment.
Win themes, one year after we published the field guide
The field guide held up on most counts and was wrong on two. What I'd rewrite today, what I wouldn't, and the one test that keeps earning its place.
Grounded AI for win-theme discovery
How we surface candidate win themes from a corpus of 80 winning proposals without inventing them. The retrieval pattern, the entailment guard, and where the system refuses rather than guesses.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 9
The January installment of the rewrite series. A public-sector services bid, a SaaS renewal proposal, and a financial-services DDQ opener. Three before-and-afters and what each rewrite was actually doing.
The end-of-year win-themes audit
Five prompts for retiring win themes that have lost discriminatory power, and promoting the ones that actually showed up in wins. A year-end ritual that takes an afternoon and pays out across the next twelve months of bids.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 8
The December installment of the rewrite series. A year-end DDQ-fronted RFP, a public-sector re-compete, and a managed-services renewal. Three rewrites and what each one was actually doing.
Proposal post-mortems: the discipline, the template, the follow-through
The canonical long-read on proposal post-mortems. What a post-mortem actually accomplishes, the template that makes the discipline sustainable, how to get a debrief from the buyer, and the three follow-through patterns that work.
Discriminator vs. feature: which one moves the score
Two real RFP sections, same underlying win theme, different framings. Which framing evaluators picked, and the rule I extracted from comparing them.
An anonymized winning proposal, torn down
A public-sector award with public artifacts. What won, what the scoring rubric rewarded, and three things a typical proposal team would have gotten wrong.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 7
The November installment of the rewrite series. A defense bid, a commercial RFP, and a security-questionnaire cover letter. Three before-and-afters and what each rewrite was actually doing.
Discriminator tests: three worked examples
The APMP discriminator test is simple to state and brutal to apply. Three real-shape proposal sections, run through the discriminator filter, with the rewrites that survive.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 6
The October installment of the rewrite series. A SaaS bid, a federal IT services bid, and a healthcare DDQ-fronted RFP. Three before-and-afters and what each rewrite was actually doing.
The executive summary that fits on two pages, always
Length is a win-theme signal to evaluators. A two-page executive summary is a commitment; a six-page executive summary is a hedge. Six compression moves I run every time.
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.
Preview: the field guide to win themes that actually win
A teaser for tomorrow's win-themes pillar. Two worked examples — one theme that fails the swap-name test, one that survives it — and what the difference looks like in the response.
Discriminators: the word your evaluator was trained on
APMP calls them discriminators. Most teams don't write them. Three real examples from awarded proposals — what they did, why they worked.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 4
Continuing the series. Three before/after exec-summary passages from this week's bids, including a tabled structure that scored well in a state-government pursuit.
Good win themes are verbs, not adjectives
Adjective win themes — robust, scalable, frictionless — fail the swap test. Verb win themes describe what changes for the buyer. Three before/after rewrites of real proposal language.
Win themes when you're the incumbent defending a contract
Defending a contract is a different proposal than winning one. The win themes that worked four years ago will lose you the renewal. Here's what changes when you're already inside.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 2
Three illustrative before-and-after exec summary openings. The patterns that fail, the edits that work, and why the second sentence is where most exec summaries lose the reader.
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.
Win themes are not value props
Six win themes — four that fail the swap test, two that survive it. The difference is the difference between a theme an evaluator scores and one they skim past.
See the proposal workflow
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