Strengthen Your Strategy: How to Run Effective Capture Review Meetings Before You Write

Is Your Team Writing Before They Aim?

You’ve made the ‘Go’ decision, set up your Development Schedule, and assigned Roles & Responsibilities. The natural impulse now is for everyone to dive headfirst into writing their assigned sections, right?

But hold on – what I often see happen next is writers crafting content based on their individual understanding of the requirements and the win strategy, leading to misaligned messages and major rework later. Are you sure everyone is truly aiming at the same target before they start writing?

The Cost of Writing Without Alignment

Starting the writing process without a formally agreed-upon strategy and solution outline is a recipe for inefficiency and weakens your final proposal. This lack of early alignment typically results in:

• Conflicting Content: Different sections present contradictory information or emphasize different value propositions.
• Wasted Effort: Writers spend significant time developing content that later needs to be heavily revised or discarded because it doesn’t fit the final agreed strategy (often revealed during a painful first draft review).
• Weak Win Themes: Key differentiators and persuasive arguments aren’t consistently woven throughout the document.
• Addressing the Wrong Needs: The team might miss the client’s core ‘hot buttons’ or focus on features instead of benefits.
• Major Rewrites: The first internal review (often a Pink Team review) becomes a massive reset exercise instead of a refinement step, adding stress and consuming valuable time.

Ultimately, a proposal written by individuals working from different interpretations of the strategy feels disjointed and is far less likely to convince the client.

The Capture Review: Aligning Your Aim Before Firing

The solution is to conduct a dedicated Capture Review Meeting (also sometimes called a Strategy Review or Solution Kick-off) before significant writing begins. This meeting’s sole purpose is to ensure the core team agrees on the ‘how we will win’ strategy and the proposed solution. Something I strongly advocate is making this a mandatory checkpoint. Here’s how to run it effectively:

1. Purpose: To formally review and gain consensus on the win strategy, key themes/messages, high-level solution design, competitive positioning, understanding of client requirements, and potential risks.

2. Attendees: Include the Proposal Manager, Capture/Sales Lead, Technical Lead/Solution Architect, key Subject Matter Experts, and potentially senior management or pricing leads. Keep it focused on key decision-makers and contributors.

3. Timing: Schedule this after the initial RFP analysis and solution brainstorming but before authors are expected to produce first drafts. Refer to your Proposal Development Schedule.

4. Key Agenda Items:

   • Recap of RFP requirements and client ‘hot buttons’.
   • Review of client intelligence and relationship status.
   • Competitive landscape assessment (strengths, weaknesses, likely approach).
   • Presentation and discussion of the proposed solution outline.
   • Definition and agreement on key win themes and differentiators (What makes us the best choice?).
   • Identification of potential risks and mitigation strategies.
   • Confirmation of alignment with Bid Team Roles & Responsibilities.

5. Document Outcomes: Crucially, document the agreed-upon strategy, themes, and solution direction. What I find essential is communicating this clearly and concisely to the entire writing team immediately afterward. Using straightforward language is key; complex strategies are useless if the writers can’t understand and apply them. This aligns perfectly with the principles of using Plain Language writing techniques to write better proposals.

6. Use a Framework: Employ a checklist or template to guide the discussion and ensure all critical aspects are covered. Proposal resources from specialists like Klariti often include frameworks for strategy and capture planning.

This meeting ensures everyone leaves with the same understanding, ready to write their sections coherently and strategically from the start.

Next Steps: From Strategy to Submission Readiness

Holding an effective Capture Review ensures your team starts writing with a unified strategy and purpose. This significantly increases the quality and consistency of your drafts. But even with a great strategy, proposals involve numerous components and compliance requirements. How do you make sure nothing critical gets missed before you hit ‘submit’?

Next, we’ll introduce the Proposal Checklist, your essential tool for ensuring complete coverage of all required proposal components and compliance checks before submission.