Government Evaluators Do Not Even Know What Win Themes Are

A Common Understanding of Win Themes

Win Themes are higher level (meta themes) features and benefits that help customers understand why your offer is best. They should drive your company’s offering. Win Themes and supporting discriminators are the MOST EFFECTIVE way to distinguish your company’s proposal from the competition’s (other than price).

With government contracting (GovCon) competitive procurements, win themes need to be tied to customer benefits that are recognizable by evaluators, as well as tied to decision criteria. Win Themes need to be consistent with your company’s win strategy. For example, if your win strategy is to offer lowest price, then your win themes should be about meeting customer requirements at lowest price and not be about innovation or a technically superior product). In addition, your company should try to socialize its win themes with the target customer besides being a part of the written proposal.

The Problem

If you can introduce me to an evaluator of a competitive GovCon procurement who knows anything about win themes, I would like to buy you lunch.? My e-mail is [email protected], and I am in the National Capital Area. You will never hear during a debrief for a competitive GovCon procurement, “Your company had great win themes.” Please do not think though that I am anti-win theme.

The concern is that too often, GovCon companies approach win themes in a manner that is half-ass.? What counts most with win themes is how did you derive them, and are you able to substantiate them? ?Their proof needs to transcend the entire proposal.? They must be developed early (i.e., not something developed right before proposal writing or even worse, added after the proposal is written). They need to be formulated in a manner that is traceable, defensible, and explainable, and as aforementioned, validated with the target customer.

The Need

There is a need today for GovCons to be able to better formulate win themes in a way that traceable, defensible, and explainable for their competitive pursuits. Key to this is having a capability that enables the company to better perform the upfront thinking and analyses necessary to win a competitive GovCon pursuit, as well as give the C-Suite the transparency and accountability that it requires.

You can call it a Cloud-based strategic analysis support system (SA2S), which:

• Enables key analyses essential to winning a competitive GovCon pursuit. For example:

―??? Issue & Key Factor Analyses

―??? Notional Winner Benchmark Analysis

―??? Competitive Assessment

―??? Discriminator Qualification

―??? Gap Analysis

―??? Win Strategy Development

―??? Win Theme Formulation

―??? Proposal Strategy Development

―??? Strength Inventory Formulation

• Visually and digitally integrates captured data.
• Preserves digital threads of context of the company, customer, and competition as it pertains to the capture effort at hand.
• Assesses the goodness of the opportunity. pursuit throughout the business development lifecycle in both a qualitative and quantitative manner.

The Benefits

In particular, the benefits of such a SA2S capability are that it would:

• Help do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.
• Enable better decision-making, particularly at the C-Suite level because it provides the needed transparency and accountability to provide the right input/feedback in a timely manner and allow for improvement to the state of the pursuit.
• Assist with answering the most important question when pursuing a competitive pursuit ― “Why your company?”
• Support the design and development of the solution for your company’s competitive response.
• Store the rich context of how and why a deal was bid to increase overall company value over time.
• Capture the company’s intellectual capital to enable future growth.
• Quantify the growth status of the enterprise.
• Lower the cost of capturing new business.
• Support collaboration across the lifecycle of the pursuit in the post-COVID-19 hybrid work environment just as effectively as if the members of the pursuit team were working face-to-face.
• Protect the customer business that your company already has.

?Win Themes Need to Be Traceable, Defensible, and Explainable

There is now available to the GovCon marketspace an innovative on-premises or Cloud-based strategic analysis support system or SA2S capability.? The SA2S is called “SET?”, and it is specifically designed to do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits. In particular, SET enables better formulation of traceable, defensible, and explainable win themes for competitive GovCon procurements. As a result, SET enables the winning of more competitive GovCon pursuits and increases the overall enterprise value of GovCon companies by providing the aforementioned benefits and more.

Author: Copyright 08 January 2025, Peter Lierni, Founder, Solutioneering, LLC

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