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.
A win theme should describe what the buyer’s life is like after they choose you, in terms specific enough that another vendor couldn’t write the same sentence. Adjective win themes — robust, scalable, innovative, premier — fail this test instantly. Any vendor in any category can write robust. The word does no work.
PropLibrary’s piece on win themes has the canonical version of this critique, and the swap test we wrote about earlier is the cheapest filter: if you can swap your company name with a competitor’s and the win theme still makes sense, the theme is generic. The deeper rule, which I want to write down here, is that the swap test passes when the win theme is a verb, not an adjective. Verbs describe change. Adjectives describe attributes. Evaluators don’t buy attributes. They buy change.
The diagnostic
A verb win theme answers the question: what does the buyer’s organization stop doing or start doing as a result of choosing us?
- We reduce implementation risk by isolating change windows to maintenance hours and providing rollback within 60 seconds.
- We cut the time from clinical-documentation backlog to billing submission by writing the discharge summary draft as the clinician charts.
- We collapse your security-questionnaire response cycle from three weeks to four days by structuring the questions against your existing control-evidence library.
Each of these sentences names a change in operational behavior. Each one would be hard for a competitor to write because the change is specific to a mechanism the competitor doesn’t have. That specificity is the win theme doing work.
Compare to the adjective forms:
- We deliver robust implementation services with industry-leading uptime.
- We provide an innovative clinical-documentation experience with premier quality.
- We accelerate your security-questionnaire response with our advanced AI platform.
Each of these is a category-generic sentence dressed in promotional adjectives. The evaluator reads them and skips. There is nothing to verify, nothing to compare, nothing to remember in the gold-team review three weeks later when the team is choosing a winner.
Three rewrites
Let me work through three before/afters drawn from real proposal contexts (anonymized, generalized — no specific customer or pursuit identified).
Rewrite 1: Implementation services for an enterprise SaaS pursuit.
Before: Our enterprise-grade implementation methodology delivers smooth deployments with minimal disruption.
The verb question: what changes operationally? The proposed system reduces production-system downtime during the cutover and rolls back faster if something fails.
After: We cut your cutover downtime to under 30 minutes by running the migration against a parallel staging environment for two weeks before go-live, and we revert to your old system in under 60 seconds if any post-cutover health check fails.
The second version is harder to write — it requires the team to know whether the 30-minute and 60-second numbers are real for them — but that is exactly the point. A win theme that requires you to know your own operational numbers is a win theme that survives evaluator scrutiny. A win theme that reads as marketing copy never had to know any numbers.
Rewrite 2: Clinical-documentation pursuit, healthcare provider.
Before: Our AI-powered platform delivers a premier clinical-documentation experience that supports your providers.
The verb question: what changes for the clinician? They write fewer notes after-hours; the documentation backlog at month-end is smaller.
After: We reduce your clinicians’ after-hours charting time by drafting the visit note as the encounter happens and surfacing it for sign-off within five minutes of visit close. Customers who deploy the workflow we recommend see month-end documentation backlogs cut to under one business day.
(If the team can verify that “under one business day” is a reproducible outcome from deployed customers, the sentence is concrete. If they can’t, they replace it with the time band they can defend. Vagueness here loses the bid; overclaim here loses the bid worse.)
Rewrite 3: Security questionnaire pursuit, B2B SaaS.
Before: Our security-questionnaire platform provides robust automation that accelerates your response cycle.
The verb question: what changes operationally for the responding team? They spend less time copy-pasting; they catch fewer hallucinated answers; questionnaires close faster.
After: We reduce your security-questionnaire response cycle from three weeks to four days for repeat questions by surfacing the prior approved answer with its evidence pointer, and we surface confidence scores on novel questions so your security lead reviews only the 15% that need their attention.
The “15%” is a specific quantitative claim. It is a win theme worth writing only if the team can defend the number. If the team can’t, the theme drops to “we surface confidence scores so your security lead reviews only the novel questions” — still a verb, still concrete, less quantitatively bold but defensible.
The pattern
Every verb win theme I’ve written that has scored well shares three properties.
It names the operational change. Not the technology, not the team, not the company. What does the buyer’s organization actually do differently?
It includes a quantitative dimension where one exists. Time reduction, error rate, throughput. The number doesn’t have to be a guarantee; it can be a band, a range, or a directional claim. But a verb without a magnitude is a wish.
It is harder to write for the alternatives. A competitor in the same category, looking at the win theme, can either say “we do that too, here’s our number” or “we don’t do that.” If both responses are legitimate, the theme is doing the work. If the competitor can write the same sentence about themselves without changing any words, the theme is generic and the swap test fails.
The work is harder. Verb win themes require the team to know things — their own deployment numbers, their own response-time bands, their own SME-engagement statistics — that adjective win themes don’t require. Most teams don’t know these numbers when they sit down to write the bid. The act of writing a verb win theme forces the discovery: someone has to find the deployed-customer cutover numbers, someone has to ask the customer-success team about post-deployment SLA performance, someone has to check whether “15%” or “20%” is the defensible number for confidence-routed questions.
That discovery work is most of the value of writing win themes at all. The win theme is the artifact; the work to write it is the part that compounds. The team that does the work once knows the number forever. The next bid starts from “we know this about ourselves” instead of “let’s write something that sounds confident.”
The closing rule
If your win theme could be a fortune-cookie line, it is not a win theme. If your win theme could be a job description for a category, it is not a win theme. If your win theme starts with “we are” and ends with an adjective, replace it with a sentence that starts with “we” and a verb that names the change.
Adjective win themes don’t lose because they are aesthetically weak (though they are). They lose because evaluators read them as filler. A 50-page proposal with adjective win themes blends into the four other 50-page proposals on the evaluator’s desk. A 50-page proposal with three sharp verb win themes — repeated and elaborated through the technical sections — is the proposal the evaluator remembers when they sit down to score.
That memorability is the entire game. Win themes are mnemonic. The verb makes them stick.