Targeted Messaging with Win Themes and Graphics
In each proposal, win themes help emphasize our client’s specific differentiators against competitors and highlight the value of our client’s business and technical solution to the customer. While win themes are a standard part of good proposal practice, creating good ones is essential to being heard and to positioning the client as better than the competition.
Optimetra has worked with many clients on many projects to create effective win themes. Our philosophy is that win themes should be few, important, meaningful, and real. Few: allowing greater impact. Important: identifying the things that are truly better. Meaningful: linking the client’s contribution to customer needs. Real: demonstrable through performance metrics, examples, and practice, rather than a promise.
Over many years, we have found the best way to illuminate win themes is the hard way – to learn everything possible about what the customer wants and what the client does. During this discovery, the good stuff reveals itself – and sometimes it isn’t always what the client leadership thinks it might be. To craft winning messages, you have to know your customer and yourself very well, because different people will often interpret the same message very differently. We bring objectivity and experience to the table, rejecting those things that are commonplace and elevating those that are not common, but are profound. We then reduce the concept to its simplest yet most forceful rendering – how can we best say, in the fewest words, what the client will do to serve a specific need, and have that message stick?
Graphics are a powerful way to communicate win themes in a proposal; in several instances, we have designed unifying, basic conceptual graphics to show how our client’s win themes integrate operational processes with state needs.
