latest additions to the Twennie library

For this series, Twennie has drawn from a landmark 2018 Harvard Business Review article titled The B2B Elements of Value by Eric Almquist, Jamie Cleghorn, and Lori Sherer. Building on that framework, we guide Twennie’s learners—especially those in technical and design services—through the process of planning a brand differentiation program using a custom-built “value pyramid.” This pyramid helps you define and deliver value that makes your firm stand out for more than just price. (We recommend reviewing the Twennie article and/or the original HBR article before starting the exercise.)

A good win theme facilitates a decision-making process in the client’s mind. That decision might be to entrust you with a project that could define someone’s career. It might involve working side-by-side with your project manager for two years, or inviting your team into their office space for six months. Whatever the case, the client is making a high-stakes choice—and your job is to help them feel confident in it. This 10 step process helps you do it comprehensively and persuasively.

Many firms rely on Red Team reviews to improve proposals, but by the time these reviews occur—often just before submission—it's too late for strategic changes. This article challenges the assumption that Red Teams alone can meaningfully enhance a proposal. It introduces the full review process: Blue Teams (for win themes), Pink Teams (for storyboarding), and Gold Teams (for risk and alignment), showing how each stage contributes to stronger, more client-focused proposals.

This article explores the critical skill of saying “no” to consulting projects—a challenge many firms face as they mature. While instinct and experience often guide senior leaders, newer consultants benefit from a more structured approach. The article presents a four-part evaluation framework: two “go” considerations (risk assessment and client quality) and two “get” considerations (internal capacity and probability of winning).

In technical services, storytelling is a core skill for helping clients understand the value of your work. Every project has the structure of a story—with characters, a challenge, and a resolution—and using familiar story patterns makes complex work easier to grasp. This article explains how to frame real-world projects using classic story types, why the client should always be the hero, and how to address problems without placing blame. It also shows how small changes in tone and language can turn dry technical descriptions into meaningful narratives.

Proposal preparation often feels like a race against the clock, made harder by the usual suspects: late contributors, disorganized planning sessions, missed details, and chaotic final edits. This article outlines the most common delays in technical proposal preparation and connects each one to relevant Twennie learning tools. If you're new to Twennie, this article points you in the direction of some excellent resources on this topic. This article helps you identify the bottlenecks and the Twennie units to fix them.

If you want to improve your win rate, stop waiting for RFPs. While RFPs feel safe and familiar, they come too late to position your firm effectively. This article breaks down why technical professionals are drawn to reactive business development and what it costs them over time. You'll learn how to calculate your lead funnel, why early pursuit matters, and how to create a lead-generating engine that delivers predictable, measurable results.

This article is the first in a series on un-commoditizing your services by delivering what clients truly value. Twennie created this series not just to teach the B2B Elements of Value framework—but to help you live it. By combining strategic insight with practical application, each unit empowers you to deliver real value to your clients in ways that are more differentiated, more emotional, and more human. We use excerpts for educational purposes only, with full credit to the original authors. If you'd like to read or license the original article, visit hbr.org.

Forms can fail especially in a go/no go decision because they become one more administrative step, another thing to do at a juncture when you’re stretched for time, and you will notice that they rarely surface insights that matter. That’s because they take you out of the instinctive centers of the brain and into the process centers. Process is important, but at this moment in a pursuit, not as important as good instincts. This video describes an alternative to forms and scoring.

Many consultants try to bring discipline to business development with forms, in this case, Go/No Go checklists and scoring systems for quantifying go and get factors like the ones you read about in the article, When to Say No to a Project. Here’s the reality: most get abandoned. They’re filled out once or twice, then quietly ignored and forgotten. This exercise provides an alternative. It guides a discussion during which the team develops hypothetical go and realistic get scenarios that establish stronger go/no go instincts.

This template is designed to support the Twennie exercise, The Tasks that Power your Lead Generation Engine. The exercise helps you create a plan for formalizing and adding further best practices to your pre-RFP business development efforts. The final step of the exercise invites you to use the second section of this template to create a Pre-RFP Business Development and Lead Generation Plan for your team.

This video will help you get to the finish line on this series. I will walk you through the exercise, The Tasks that Power your Lead Generation Engine, during which you will make use of the two templates, The Tasks that Power Your Lead Generation Engine, and the Pre-RFP Business Development Planning Task Cards. Then we will wrap up by looking at the prompt set, Pre-RFP Business Development Habits – Sources for Leads Other than Purchasing Sites, which helps you establish the habits that drive your lead generation engine.

This template supports the Red Team Review exercise, a structured session that helps technical and consulting teams perform a focused, impartial evaluation of a near-final proposal. The reviewers—called the Red Team—are individuals who did not contribute to the proposal and can assess it from the client’s perspective. The exercise includes six clear steps: recruiting reviewers, choosing a collaboration platform, distributing materials, preparing the proposal team, leading the review, and implementing the feedback.

A Red Team Review Exercise is a structured session that helps technical and consulting teams perform a focused, impartial evaluation of a near-final proposal. The reviewers—called the Red Team—are individuals who did not contribute to the proposal and can assess it from the client’s perspective. The exercise includes six clear steps: recruiting reviewers, choosing a collaboration platform, distributing materials, preparing the proposal team, leading the review, and implementing the feedback.

Most technical professionals are trained to respond to RFPs, but not to recognize opportunities upstream, before formal requests are issued. This prompt set is designed to shift that mindset. It teaches consultants and business developers how to hunt for leads in unexpected places: capital plans, blog posts, competitor websites, public engagement events, old colleagues, and casual conversations. The goal isn’t to find a guaranteed project with every prompt, but to build the "muscle memory" that make opportunity recognition second nature.

This 20-prompt set helps leaders assess their learning culture and plan for a change. The first five invite reflection on current norms and assumptions. The second imagines a future where skills and habits are stronger, and what that future could mean for the team and organization. The third moves into planning: how much time can be devoted to learning, and how should it be structured? Finally, the last section challenges leaders to take action, set the tone, and even contribute their own Twennie units.

Twennie offers a full learning library that includes articles, videos, interviews, prompt sets, exercises, and templates — all are designed to create real change, in as little as 20 minutes at a time. But no team needs every unit. And no team should be expected to use everything on Twennie. The key is choosing well, based on your team’s capacity, momentum, and appetite for growth. Watch this video for tips on how to choose units strategically and make advantageous use of the adaptability built into every unit.

Prompt sets are structured collections of short, actionable learning tasks. They’re designed to be completed in small bursts of time... typically 20 minutes or less, and many take less than five minutes. They help teams build awareness, test ideas, and develop habits in a low-risk space. Twennie includes dozens of prompt sets covering a wide range of topics from proposal strategy to communication, leadership, and teamwork.

This video is the second in a series on creating a lead generating engine for your team. We’ve created a prompt set called Pre-RFP Business Development Culture – What Does Your Team Believe About BD?, which goes along with this series, and a template to analyze the results. They're designed to reveal how your team thinks about early-stage business development a week or day at a time, where they feel confident, where they hesitate, and where old habits or misconceptions might be holding them back.

If you want to change your project win rate, you’ll have to change your team’s habits. Changing doesn’t happen easily. Plus, we can still win the odd project by simply responding to RFPs, so the temptation is always there. The trouble is that waiting for RFPs has us working in a hazier arena. In the “waiting game,” our results are never as reliable as we need them to be if we want to grow. This series provides resources for teams hoping to change their approach to BD so they can have earlier awareness of projects and set themselves up for the win.

A structured, interactive session designed to help teams establish a repeatable approach to business development efforts before a formal RFP is released. Facilitators guide teams through nine core steps, including choosing BD tasks, identifying learning goals, selecting key terminology and tools, planning pull marketing activities, assigning accountability, budgeting time, and incorporating fun.

This template is designed to support the Pre-RFP BD Planning Exercise, a structured, interactive session designed to help teams establish a repeatable approach to business development efforts before a formal RFP is released. The exercise can be facilitated in-person or online using tools like Mural or a printed template. Facilitators guide teams through nine core steps, including choosing BD tasks, identifying learning goals, selecting key terminology and tools, planning pull marketing activities, assigning accountability, budgeting time, and incorporating fun.