Themes, discriminators and differentiators form the basis for telling your customer why they should select you. There are basically two types of themes in proposals, win themes and proposal themes.
Win themes (one or two per proposal) are main high level ideas you want to impart consistently throughout your proposal. The win theme focuses on your customers’ hot buttons, the things that concerns them most. Proposal themes are more specifically focused on a proposal volume or subsection and provide a short summary found in the first or second sentence of the narrative.
Discriminators are features and solutions that make your company unique from your competitors.
Differentiators while not unique, demonstrate a solution or offering that is different from your competitors.
As a proposal professional I have sat in many a proposal kick off meeting having heard from the capture team (manager and/or individuals responsible for qualifying the opportunity and obtaining customer intelligence) “We have the win themes and discriminators developed for the proposal.” This sounds great until you actually see what they came up with. Not to put a damper on their enthusiasm, but what has been developed is many times a capability or accomplishment list not “themes.” For example CMMI Level 3 process, Mature Human Resources Department, Government Approved Accounting System, and Local Office Presence describe the offeror’s capabilities and possible discriminators.
While these attributes may be important they are not necessarily “win themes”.
A method or formula for developing good theme statements involves identifying a feature (what is important to you), its benefit (what is important to your customer) communicating the solution and substantiating the benefit, providing proof (quantifiable). Some fictional examples include:
• Win Theme (this assumes quality is a hot button for the customer) – Our customizable quality control templates provide an automated method for capturing quality metrics that have resulted in measurable quality improvements for 10 of our current customers.
• Proposal Theme ( this may be appropriate for the past performance volume) – Our successful experience at Fort XYZ modifying over 1000 RF communications kits in the past year, demonstrates our proven techniques for modifying the same RF communications kits at Fort ABC.
Discriminators are what set you apart from your competition. They are what make your company, solution, or approach unique. Differentiators are similar in that they offer a feature or solution different from your competitors but may not be unique. The use of discriminators and or differentiators must address something of importance to your customer. Some fictional examples of discriminators include:
• The Super Malware blocker software application developed by our in house software engineering staff is the only malware blocker software currently approved for use by the State of North Carolina Department of Human Services.
• Our team’s proposed program manager was the first engineer certified by the FAA to fly the ACME experimental one person jet.
Taking time to develop meaningful and strong theme statements that demonstrate the features and benefits of your solution and identifying discriminators and differentiators in your proposal will help your customer make the decision to choose you.