Regan Conley Communications
Kiewit Bridge and Marine
Targeted branding, writing and marketing workshops improved staff skills and efficiency to produce more winning proposals
Kiewit Bridge & Marine, a specialist division of a Fortune 500 construction company, had built a very successful proposal team with administrators and engineers with both permanent and rotating assignments. However, growing competition and client standards raised expectations and demanded new strategies. To avoid major revisions that wasted time and resources, threatened deadlines, or lost business, KB&M needed to more effectively position proposals earlier in the process and present value propositions and differentiators in a clear and compelling manner. Rather than hire the usual marketing specialists, the proposal group wanted to retain current staff with deep institutional knowledge and its access to rotating subject matter experts.
Project Services
Branding
Proposal messaging & win themes
Strategic messaging
Writer and editor
Story creation
Proposal development
Trainer
Writing workshops
Markets
Employee Communications
Fortune 500
Heavy civil construction
Infrastructure
Approach
Training the team in marketing fundamentals would improve the process and the final proposals. The senior graphic designer and I produced a series of 30- to 60-minute workshops that could be repeated as staff rotated and adapted for several major proposals every year.
My work included:
A branding workshop (co-created with the designer) to train the core team to build a brand for each proposal that would resonate with clients
A marketing session for writers, reviewers and sponsors teaching practical skills and knowledge, like differentiators and win themes, and how to include these in proposals
Writing That Convinces, teaching a simple formula to build better arguments in all writing
Results
Short, repeatable workshops made training many people feasible without a significant investment of time. This enabled the team to retain access to SMEs and institutional knowledge.
Staff appreciated the straightforward approach. They used the tools to produce better first drafts that were more likely to meet requirements and identify differentiators.
Better drafts from SMEs alleviated time demands on writing, editing, and reviews, saving money overall.
Identifying important marketing and branding elements early on produced more competitive and focused proposals, and eliminated costly, late-stage overhauls.
Proposal sponsors recognized these results and began to request the workshops as part of proposal kickoffs.