Bid to Win Toolkit: Field Guide, Excel Workbook, Worksheets and AI Companion

The Bid to Win Field Guide plus the working tools: an auto-scoring Excel workbook, Word worksheets and a bonus AI Companion with 11 prompts. Everything a small BD team needs to run a Shipley-style bid process on its next RFP.

What you get (5 files)

• The Bid to Win Field Guide (17-page PDF).
• An Excel workbook with 8 tabs: an auto-scoring bid/no-bid with adjustable thresholds, win strategy, a 300-row compliance matrix that flags gaps and missing owners, a theme builder that checks your wording, a review schedule that warns when Red Team is too close to the due date, a review findings log with a must-fix counter, and pipeline metrics (win rate, no-bid rate, cost per win).
• Word worksheets (7 pages): the five worksheets plus a lessons-learned sheet. Type in them or print them.
• Bonus AI Companion (4-page PDF and TXT): 11 copy-paste prompts that turn Claude, ChatGPT or Grok into your proposal analyst, from pulling every “shall” out of an RFP to running a mock Red Team, with data-safety rules.

What’s inside the guide

• Six habits of teams that win bids: qualify early, run a bid/no-bid gate, write the win strategy before the RFP drops, build a compliance matrix, write to the evaluator, and run color-team reviews.
• A weighted bid/no-bid scorecard so you stop chasing bids you can’t win.
• Win strategy in plain English: hot buttons, discriminators and ghosting.
• A compliance matrix walkthrough for Sections L, M and C, so you never lose on a technicality.
• A theme statement formula with before-and-after rewrites.
• Every color team (Blue, Black Hat, Pink, Red, Gold, White Glove) on one page.
• A 30-day adoption plan for small BD teams, 10 mistakes that lose bids, and a glossary.
• Five fill-in worksheets: bid/no-bid scorecard, win strategy one-pager, compliance matrix, theme statement builder and color-team review form.

What it costs

$59. One time. No subscription. The guide alone is $29.

The catch

The workbook needs Excel or a compatible app. Formulas were tested in Excel; other apps may handle some features differently. Never paste controlled or classified information into a public AI tool; the AI Companion explains the rules.

Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Shipley Associates. “Shipley-style” describes the widely used process, not their materials.

Who it’s for

Small and mid-size government contractors who want the process and the tools to run it, on a live bid, this month.

Questions

Can I share it with my team? Yes. It’s for personal and team use. Please don’t resell or repost it.

Refunds? If it isn’t useful to you, email me at hello@sethlevanen.com within 14 days of buying and I’ll refund the purchase. You don’t need to give a reason. Please email me before you file a dispute with your bank, so I can fix it faster.

About me

I’m Seth Levanen. I’ve spent 26 years in B2B sales, most recently in battery, defense and autonomy tech. I help owners and sales leaders cut busywork without cutting quality. I call that the smart-cut. More at sethlevanen.com.