The Winning Pitch - Top tips to writing bids, pitches and sales proposals that get results

	Aug/Sept 2010

Top tips for writing bids, pitches and sales proposals that get results

Your guide to writing winning proposals

Welcome to the August/September edition of The Winning Pitch, a bi-monthly newsletter on writing bids, pitches and sales proposals that get results.

Government tenders are increasingly imposing page and word count restrictions, and often give you far less space to get your point across than you would like.

The thought of a short proposal may seem appealing to begin with, but in fact writing to externally-imposed word limits is difficult and time-consuming. In this month’s article, I look at some dos and don’ts of writing to word limits that I hope will offer some insight into this increasingly common challenge for proposal writers.

In July I was invited back CBS Interactive’s Australian business site, BNet, to chat to Phil Dobbie about ‘The Seven Cardinal Sins of Proposal Writing’. If you have a spare 16 minutes, take a listen to the interview; there’s bound to be a few in there that are familiar to you. Did I miss something? Email me and let me know. I’ll cover it in the next edition of The Winning Pitch.

Enjoy!

ROBYN HAYDON
Principal Consultant
Winning Words Corporate Communications

“What's your strike rate when it comes to successful submissions? If it's less than 100%, you could learn something from The Shredder Test. The chapter summaries are excellent…a concise, useful read.”
The Age

“A quick way to learn a great deal about proposal writing…excellent value…highly recommended.” Australian Marketing Institute

“Strategies, tactics, how-to's and tips that any business can use.” Herald Sun

FEATURE ARTICLE...When every word counts: writing to word limits

Spotlight

Government tenders are increasingly imposing page and word count restrictions, and often give you far less space to get your point across than you would like.

Although proponents rarely welcome them, there are good reasons for these restrictions.

Scoring bids is a tedious job and evaluators are faced with piles of proposals, many of which consist of nothing but long-winded, cut-and-paste boilerplate. Imposing page and word limits is one way to make proponents think long and hard about what they are writing.

While I do appreciate the reasons, I sometimes I think the restrictions go a bit too far. I recently worked on a consortium bid in a closed, invitation-only tender. Despite the small competitive field, the requesting department had word-limited every single question and some of the limits were challenging indeed; try a 300-word Executive Summary and only 250 words for all the CVs. (For comparison, this relatively short article with table contains 608 words).

The thought of a short proposal may seem appealing to begin with, but in fact writing to externally-imposed word limits is difficult and time-consuming. That’s because the most persuasive proposals are those where the writer’s passion and enthusiasm for the project are given the freedom and latitude to really shine. Word-limiting proposals means that a lot of creative effort is expended just on editing the content to fit the requirements.

In my experience, producing word or page-limited proposals can take up to 50% more time and effort. While I’m certainly no fan of these restrictions, they are here to stay so it’s important to find a way to work with them. Here are a few techniques that I know work – and a few things to avoid.

DO	DON’T
Plan your content before you start to write. Focused writing requires less editing.	Don’t cobble together your content from boilerplate and past proposals and then start working backwards. Unfocused writing needs lots of editing and you may be tempted to keep content that would be better off discarded.
Hit ‘em between the eyes; put your best material up front in the first few sentences.	Don’t save your best material for the conclusion; it’s too easily overlooked by skim readers.
Use bullet points to save on word count. For example, instead of: ‘Sue has worked in the sector for approximately 10 years with a range of experience in housing, case management support services, and primary health.’ (24 words) Try: ‘10 years’ experience in housing, case management support services and primary health’ (12 words)	Don’t be precious about your well-crafted words. If there’s a shorter way to say it, find it.
Include evidence for every claim you make. To save space, talk only in specifics– what you did, results you got, why you recommend this course of action.	Don’t be tempted to shorten your key points to generalities that make sense only to you, or desert your evidence just to get more words in.
Use visuals. For example, reduce process steps to diagrams that contain text. Make them descriptive enough that they can stand alone.	Don’t try to say it all in words, especially if you have the opportunity to use pictures.
Footnote acronyms to save on word count, especially if the content is technical and acronyms are unavoidable.	Don’t give up your precious word count to less critical content. This is one case where abbreviations of names can be OK (provided they are footnoted with an explanation: think ‘AFL’ not ‘Australian Football League’).
Show you’ve respected the limits. Include a word count at the end of each word-limited section.	Don’t exceed the limits. This is risky and shows a lack of respect for the evaluators’ instructions.

My interview with Phil Dobbie on BTalk, CBS Interactive’s Australian business site

It’s always a pleasure talking to Phil, who invited me back to BTalk this month to discuss the seven cardinal sins of proposal writing. In my experience, they are:

Bidding for anything that moves.
Ignoring the competition.
Not being strong enough on the reasons why the customer should choose you.
Diving straight in to write, without first thinking about what you need to say.
Cobbling it together at the last minute.
Cutting and pasting from old proposals and hoping the customer won’t notice.
Claims that lack evidence to prove they are true.

Some of these will probably be familiar and you may even have others to add. Did I miss something? Email me and let me know. I’ll cover it in the next edition of The Winning Pitch.

About Winning Words

Winning Words works exclusively writing tenders, bids and business proposals, and we get results. Clients we work with have won and retained important contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

We can help you plan, write and manage critical bids and tenders; review and improve your approach to writing tenders and proposals; coach and develop bid professionals and in-house writing teams; and continually challenge you and your team to make sure every submission is the very best it can be.

Call (03) 9557 4585 or email info@winningwords.com.au .

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