Menu
Investing the emotional, time and budgetary resource in the production of a new-business proposal – whether in answer to a tender call or in a proactive pursuit – should be founded on a (crystal) clear and decisive strategy about the market segment you’re targeting.
Jordan has worked with numerous enterprises – small, medium, and large – to hone their clarity with regard to their target market or markets.
Thank you for your input and assistance with the development of TeleGrid’s strategic planning process. We found your knowledge and insight into the marketing process interesting and stimulating.
Your quick grasp of the issues facing TeleGrid and your suggestions for change, based on your obviously sound experience, were both useful and achievable.
We called Jordan in because the increasing pace of mergers and acquisitions within the IT and Communications industry was beginning to see Allaw lose vital relationship continuity with our large corporate clients. This was eroding a significant part of our long-standing business base.
It was important not only to reposition our services with the identified new key partners within those client organisations (clients such as NCR, HP-Compaq, Nortel Networks) but also to re-define our value proposition, in order to strengthen our relationship with them.
Jordan played an essential role in helping us define our offering, along with its strategic and competitive strengths. Importantly, she also helped us align these with the clients’ needs in such a manner that we became their only sensible choice of service provider.
When you work with someone as exceptionally talented as Jordan Kelly, you know it right from the start. Add to this her complete focus on understanding both your business and you, and you realise that this is something pretty special.
Jordan helped me realise exactly what is unique about my business and how to present it in down-to-earth, crystal clear marketable language. She has a gift for words, the words that communicate what you have to offer to those who will want it, and who will become your customers or clients. I have never come across someone so completely committed to helping me get it exactly right. What’s more, you know that you’ve got it right.
It’s not a one-way street. Jordan supports you to do your own thinking too. Indeed, by supporting you to do this, she finds out from you, and helps you to express, what you have been searching for.
Her work is a combination of skilful facilitation and brilliant suggestions. Working with Jordan has been illuminating, challenging – and fun! She will keep you on your toes, and you will know that you are dancing in your right direction.
It’s hard to know which of Jordan Kelly’s incredibly wide range of skills takes precedence over the other. She has the invaluable talent of being able to quickly and accurately discern an organisation’s business objectives and convert them into cutting-edge marketing strategy.
She has the ability to then execute every aspect of that strategy to the ‘nth’ degree of accuracy and perfection. She also has the highest imaginable standards and an eagle eye for detail. All of this pays huge dividends for her clients.
Possessing as deep and detailed a knowledge base as possible about each of an enterprise’s opponents is one of the fundamentals of competitive intelligence (CI).
CI is one of Jordan’s core skills and she employs it in the formulation of all marketing and bid strategy and pursuit documentation.
In the high stakes, ultra-competitive infrastructure services market, true insight and strategic excellence are invaluable in achieving success.
Jordan practices what she preaches, and has the ability to provide an independent and insightful critique of the kind that can break the insular group-think that major bid teams can self-create.
I can recommend Jordan as an advisor to teams looking to check and challenge themselves and their strategies for success before finding out the hard way.
Jordan Kelly has a totally unique ability to walk into a company and, with clever and incisive questioning, identify the smartest and most relevant competitive strengths on which to build its key marketing productions and sales documentation.
She’s sharp; sharp enough that I’m glad she’s working with us and not our competitors.
Jordan, thank you so very much.
Your contribution to our winning bid was greatly appreciated. We are all thrilled here at the win with the New Zealand Defence Force.
Again, our thanks.
Alliance Network International recently contracted with Jordan Kelly to assist us with developing an overall strategy and putting together a tender for a very large bid that was crucial to the long-term growth of our business.
Jordan lead us down a strategic assessment path that formed an essential part of the overall document development process. She guided our executive team through many fascinating and highly productive processes to achieve a truly strategic bid, at every level; a bid that has demonstrated to us that a winning strategy is also able to bring objectivity and reason to a price-focused client.
The extremely effective techniques used for drilling down into the individual areas of the tender, identifying the perfect strategy to underpin each and then putting it all together in a document that easily flowed from section to section to provide an overall ‘big picture’ is a tribute to both her strategy and writing skills.
An additional and unexpected benefit was the learning we received through her teaching ability and her valuable knowledge transfer focus throughout this whole process. The bid development processes that Jordan has led us through will be used in our future tenders.
While having precision clarity on an enterprise’s target markets, and its intended clients from within those segments, pinpoints the bullseye, it’s the crafting of the arrow and the firing of it that counts thereafter.
The skill sets she teaches are highly relevant to our business. They can make a huge difference in converting opportunities into prospects, or even creating opportunities in the first place. She has a great coaching style, and whenever resistance arose she handled it well in my view.
She also showed us how to weave some of her own magic through our writing, to create continuity, relevance and a compelling, readable style. I picked up some great ideas, techniques and principles in these sessions, which I’ll be putting into practice immediately.
Our weekend workshop by Jordan Kelly helped me see the bid evaluation process from the client’s perspective. I now cringe when I look back on some of the bids and client communications I have sent in the past. Her unique perspective was exactly what I was looking for, for our sales and marketing team and all the participants were very impressed with both the content and the delivery.
I can honestly say that the concepts that Jordan uses have already become part of the way we work and interact with our clients, not only in the realm of a bid, but also in day-to-day interactions. Whilst not for the faint-hearted, Jordan’s workshop lead us through the bid strategy formulation process in a way which completely changed the way we approach our clients. She does this, not by formulas or templates, but by a complete paradigm shift, which truly changes ingrained behaviours.
Thanks, Jordan, for what should become a pivotal moment in the history of our company.
PS: It is amazing! Even with general customer correspondence, you have managed to instil a deep-set change in the way I am communicating with my customers.
Jordan Kelly has worked with our team on a variety of tenders, and a variety of tender types.
We are a small, tight-knit team, comprising everything from our Executive PA, to our Construction and Project Managers, our Estimators, our Business Development Manager, and myself, North Queensland Manager.
“What has been particularly gratifying and valuable about her involvement with our team, is that, while she lead us, taught us, and co-managed our activities with us, she was at the same time one of us. She was an absolutely integral member of our team.
Although her mandate was to work with us on the production of our RFP responses, every aspect of her work with us actually became a coaching session and a learning experience in its own right. The residual value of her bid work with us has been immense in that regard. We simply don’t do things the same way any more, and in every part of our business development work and bidding activities we now find ourselves guided by the principles she has progressively instilled in us.
Her involvement with us continues to be an asset to our operation.
No proposal or bid of any real significance should be produced without a guiding strategy. In our world, we don’t fire the arrow until we’ve taken informed aim. To do so is to neglect to take full opportunity to optimise the outcome and the enterprise’s Return on Investment in entering into the pursuit.
You have taught me a new ‘way of thinking’. No templates can take the place of analysing information for a tender process, formulating strategy and preparing a ‘tailored solution’ to suit the client. I look forward to applying these new skills in my everyday work and future bids.
You have taught me to see bidding strategy from a different perspective. You reinforced the fact that we have to connect with the client on all levels, not just the economic level but also on the emotional level. The course was extremely intense but you kept us on the right track, keeping us focused to ensure we saw the ‘bigger picture’. It was a very rewarding session.
Thank you, Jordan!
Jordan was engaged by Abigroup Contractors to independently review historical bids, suggest document improvements and enhance its pre-bid smarts.
Through a well-defined and targeted coaching program, skilfully articulated by Jordan, our bid staff gained an invaluable appreciation of the strategic importance of well-researched proposals, in-depth questioning, and forming a deeper understanding of our clients’ value criteria.
For those companies or individuals serious about the need for their staff to actually think and so improve the ‘non-cost’ and ‘quality elements’ of their relationship contract bid submissions, I recommend Jordan to you.
If you require a strategic thinker who can apply a laser sharp and incisive line of questioning, who can cut through jargon and clutter like a knife, and who can rapidly pull all the elements of the ‘big picture’ into one cohesive strategy, then Jordan Kelly’s is the very best brain you could hire.
Jordan has a distinctive, fresh, smart style that greatly focuses the thought processes of an organisation’s own business development team. I for one have found hers to be a far more productive approach than the standard ‘methodologies’ employed by so many consultants.
The benefits of this style include not only the production of winning bids but also a very effective transfer of her skills to those executives fortunate to be part of the strategy sessions she so deftly facilitates.
Jordan Kelly recently provided guidance of extraordinarily high quality to Oracle in the planning and production of an important strategic communication project.
Her sharpness of mind, objectivity and lateral thinking skills were the perfect resources to help us clarify and convey the competitive strengths of our solution.
Consolidating the benefits of her facilitation skills is her remarkable talent as a strategic writer. This ensured we effectively communicated the superiority of the Oracle solution.
Formulating a winning submission – whether a proactive proposal, the response to a formal tender call (e.g. Expression of Interest, Request for Proposal), or a customizable, re-usable template – it’s all our specialty . . . along with all that goes before it in the broader production process.
I have received the final copy of my new-business proposal. Just to let you know that I am very happy with this document. I do feel very fortunate that our paths crossed as you have produced something on my behalf which will provide me with a distinct competitive edge.
You have made this process very simple; you are obviously a very talented strategic writer and your ability to quickly understand my business needs has been very impressive. Thank you also for your quick turnaround time and the very professional service you have provided to me.
Jordan provided Bombardier Transportation with support to spearhead our tender response strategy for a multi-million dollar overseas rail project.
For an engineering organisation, more product-focused than ‘market’-focused, Jordan showed the tender team another way to present the tender that was creative, customer-focused, and ensured we stayed on target consistently throughout the tender documentation.
Jordan has a great feel for a customer’s needs and aspirations, through thorough research of background material to personal contact strategy.
Jordan demonstrated a keen sense of what mattered to the customer, and her prose in the key front piece, the Executive Summary, was appropriate, emphatic and balanced.
I recommend Jordan to others open to a new way of expression in the difficult world of tendering.
Jordan has helped us immensely in conveying our message clearly and succinctly.
When it comes to sharing the story, she has an amazing ability to script it.
I’ve been reading through some of the documentation we were sending to clients before we started our coaching with you, and cringing.
I can see everything we were doing wrong really clearly now.
All the competitive intelligence, all the client insights and other research, all the strategy smarts and all the top-shelf copywriting fall flat if they don’t culminate in an impacting, context-appropriate, strategy-supporting end-product.
Barbi’s creative talent and razor-sharp ability to translate commercial objective into design brief is legendary – and almost without precedent, according to Jordan’s more than two decades of experience in working intensively with developers and designers. Thus, Jordan’s initiation to Barbi to support her in her work for Proactive Proposals’ clientele.
Barbi has been formatting Research Insights’ proposals and reports for several years. I can say without hesitation, that her skills have added immensely to the professional presentation of our documentation. Among Barbi’s key attributes are her prompt responses to briefs, her great masterminding of solutions, her amazing graphics, and her expert advice and readiness to assist.
Barbi is incredible. It took me years, but finally I found a designer that meets and exceeds my standards. And speaking as the owner of a creative agency myself, I do so with some authority. Barbi is very creative, easy to work with, flexible, and can competently handle a wide range of projects. She's my go-to person when I need help with anything – print or web – and I'm over the moon to be working with her.
Barbi is excellent at quickly understanding what we need and then getting exactly the right amount of creativity into the materials she creates for our clients. Can’t recommend her highly enough!
Barbi is an awesome website developer who was affordable and so easy to work with. I appreciate her patience and I love the end result! I am totally recommending her to everyone!