Why It’s Good to Get Comfortable with Discomfort

At the moment, I am interviewing successful business development leaders as part of a new project.

Something that they all have in common is that they are comfortable with a level of daily uncertainty that would be very confronting to many others. In other words, being uncomfortable is actually comfortable for them. It’s when they get too comfortable that they start to worry!

Bill Gates once said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.”

Successful business development leaders welcome discomfort because they understand this well.

They know that there is a delicate balance between trading off past achievements and experience, and presenting something that’s new, fresh and exciting. They get that customers are only really interested in their team’s 300 combined years of experience if it means that they are using them to do something interesting and valuable right now.

Achievements are great, but like trophies in a trophy cabinet, they eventually start to gather dust and cobwebs. For example, in my local area, there's a restaurant with a sign proudly proclaiming “Food Shop Hygiene Shop of the Year”. Under this, in huge letters, it also says “…2000”. The award was a great achievement — at the turn of the century. But as customer who might be thinking of eating there today, it’s more off-putting than enticing.

This thought might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, but that’s actually a good thing.

The seeds of future success can come from many places — a chance meeting, a brilliant idea, or even just a deliberate decision to think differently. It is worth making yourself just a little bit more uncomfortable to find them.

Turn plotting into planning!

In today’s sales environment, it takes more than just plotting to achieve success. It takes planning.

Planning involves developing new things that we want to make public — that we want our market to know about — so that customers and prospects will see us as the obvious people to buy them from when it comes times to do so.

There’s a very good reason to do this, even though it feels counterintuitive when compared to the way we have traditionally been taught to sell.

Back in the handshake days, sales deals were conducted under a veil of secrecy. Plotting these deals was very deliberately a behind-the-scenes strategy. We didn’t want to leave a trace or let competitors know what we were doing.

In today’s procurement-led environment, when the value of government contracts and the winner of those contracts are published online, there is no veil of secrecy anymore.

Selling to procurement might look like it’s all about paperwork, but actually it’s all about positioning.

In her excellent new book Agile Selling, Jill Konrath says “Buyers have changed: fundamentally, drastically and for good. (They) self-educate, leaving the seller totally out of the loop. When they finally decide to engage, they’re often 60- 70% of the way through their buying process.”

According to Konrath, a seller’s success today depends on “knowing more… Providing value…and meeting (buyers) where they’re at.”

In my experience, something that is particularly appealing to customers is to see that suppliers have things going on that they are not just waiting to be funded, or paid, for.

This shows that you are interested in something other than just taking the customer’s money. It creates an energy and excitement around what you are doing. Even if what you’re building is not specifically for that customer — maybe it’s for yourself, or for another customer, or for another industry that you play in —it creates something tangible that you can talk about and that customers can see.

There is nothing more soul destroying than being in the business of serving customers, but having to wait to be chosen.

Planning creates positioning, and breaks you out of the waiting game. It also helps you to take some of your power back.

Essentially, planning is just a way of getting all of your business-winning ideas out of your head and figuring out how you're going to achieve them. So what are you planning?

Is There a Gender Difference In The Way We Pitch for Business?

There is no question that men and women can both be very successful in sales and business development roles. However, the way that they go about it can be very different. In general, men seem comfortable with taking more risks, while women seem comfortable doing more work. 

In fact, both risk-taking and hard work are equally important to getting a result with an important bid or proposal.

• Taking risks is important, because pitching for business is very competitive and we need to find a way of coming out on top. Clear winners take risks without fear of loss, and are prepared to stand out and be different.

• Doing the work is also important, because we need to build innovation, best practice, and continual improvement so we have something to sell. Hard workers deliver on these promises, and are very good at driving bids and putting proposals together.

One way to support both these factors is to aim for gender balance in your bid team. If your team is full of guys, you might find a bias towards taking risks and generating ideas, but the actual work and follow-up might be lacking. If you have a team with many women, you might have a lot of willing workers, but they might need some encouragement to take more risks and overcome any perceived fear of failure.

It’s also a good idea look at your own preferences and make sure that you put people around you — of both genders — who can do the things that you find a challenge. If you're a risk taker and big picture person, you need detail people around you. If you are great at getting things done, and good at the detail, you might need help with the bigger picture, and encouragement to be bolder when making decisions about the opportunities to pursue.

Planning a Compliant Tender Response

Every question that’s asked in a tender document will contain more than one layer, that is, several questions within the question. Look for the layers and you will produce more compliant answers and also get better results. In a session with my Master Class group this morning, we were talking about content planning for tender responses. This is a very important topic, but often one that people struggle to get their heads around.

When we're on a deadline and there's a lot of work to do, it is very tempting to jump straight into writing, but in fact, this is never going to give you the best result.

Planning is the essential step between creating your bid strategy and executing it through what you write in your proposal.  But even the word “planning” sounds as much fun as getting a root canal. It feels like it will slow us down and stop the momentum and the flow of ideas.

However, I look at planning somewhat differently. When I plan proposal content with teams, I find that it actually gives a really laser sharp focus to what we’re about to do.

It’s a bit like flying a plane. If bid strategy work is the preparation for take-off, and writing is cruising at altitude, then planning what happens just after take-off when the flight is still ahead of us. Many things are possible, but many things could still go wrong.  Planning gives us an opportunity to see them, and work out the bumps before they throw us off course.

Often in our haste to get a bid done by the deadline, we compile proposals rather than write them. We think: “okay, here's a question about quality assurance. I'm just going to copy paste my standard answer about quality assurance in here.” But questions are rarely asked exactly the same way each time. So take the time to identify the layers in the question that your answer needs to cover. And think of your standard content from past proposals as a reference library, not the finished answer.

Your Contract Delivery Team Is Your Primary Selling Team

The rise of procurement has fundamentally changed the way sales relationships are transacted. Your contract delivery team becomes your primary selling team as soon as a contract is signed. Clients are mentally marking your team on every interaction. And with so much contract communication done in writing, the risk of damaging a client relationship through poor communication is greater than ever before.

Contract delivery teams have a huge influence over how the customer sees not just your day-to-day performance, but how well you are managing customer communication, best practices and innovation over the life of the contract. Because they work at the coalface every day, team members are also in an ideal position to identify how to make more money and to reduce profit leaks.

Contract delivery teams usually contain a mix of technical and operational people, each of whom is very clever and knowledgeable in their own area of expertise. However, many of them don’t really think they can sell, or don’t see it as their job to sell.

Through working on bids and tenders with dozens of contract delivery teams in many different industries, I have seen first-hand how the lights go on when these smart people realise what an enormous contribution they can make to a winning bid. I am really passionate about seeing that effect last when they get back to their day job, and giving them the tools, the techniques and the confidence they need to not only deliver the contract with excellence, but to step up into their selling role.

How much more business could you retain, how would your reputation improve, and how much influence would you have with customers if your contract delivery teams communicated with more authority?

My Client Leadership Program gives operational, technical and front line delivery staff the confidence, clarity and communication skills to act as an effective selling team. Contact me if you would like a white paper with more information about this program.

“We Have a Quality Process for Bids, so Why Aren’t We Winning Any?”

When I talk to revenue owners who are responsible for leading bids and proposals, one of the frustrations they often mention is that there has already been a fair bit of effort expended to document their quality assurance process for bids. Often this involves multiple stages and toll gates and is meant to be followed rigidly for every opportunity that they pursue. Now, I'm not knocking process. Following a process is important to get a replicable result.

My question is —what result are you modelling your replicable process on?

One of the problems with bid quality processes is that the result that we're looking to achieve is an elusive one. A successful bid strategy is like a snowflake – no two are ever exactly the same. Bid strategy can’t be pinned down just by following a series of steps, particularly when those steps don't provide enough instruction to actually help people to do the tasks within the steps.

For example, I've seen bid quality processes which just say "Step number 23 - develop win themes." Okay, that's great as a headline, but what if your team doesn't have a process to develop win themes? What will tend to happen is that everybody sits around in a room and kicks around the reasons why they think the customer should choose them. This then ends up in the document as some kind of laundry list titled "Why You Should Choose Us". This is rarely effective.

Developing win themes for bids is a creative process —it's not about producing a widget to a certain standard or tolerance. It's about being able to recognise all the factors that are going to shape and influence the customers' decisions; particularly what they most value, what we can best deliver and what positions us best against competitors.

A quality process isn't enough to deliver a winning bid, unless there are also instructions, training and practice built in for the people who will actually be executing the process. Some big organisations do this very well, but there are many others that need help to be able to follow a quality process effectively.

These days, I very rarely work with organisations on routine bids where their staff haven't first been through my Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class Program. There are many techniques in that program that help to fill in the gaps of the quality process and actually give people the tools that they can use to follow instructions like "Develop win themes."

The May Master Class Program sold out early, but we are now accepting enrolments for July.

Contact me if you would like a detailed syllabus and overview for the Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class.

Earning or Learning? Separating Proposal Development from Proposal Skills

Are you looking for help with an important bid? Do you want to improve your proposal development skills or processes at the same time? Here's why it's better to separate these two objectives. When people approach me for help with bids, proposals and tender responses, the most common form that the enquiry takes is this:

"Can you come in and work side by side with us on a bid so that we can learn from you?"

There are two questions here, and the answer to both is yes - but not at the same time.  Here’s why.

Steven Covey’s classic time management grid introduced us to the idea of tasks that are important or not important, and urgent or not urgent.

• Getting an important bid across the line is an important task that is also urgent.
• Building your skills in bids, proposals and tender responses so you can win more business, more often is important — but not urgent.

Urgent tasks will always take priority over non-urgent tasks.

When there is an important bid coming up, everybody's attention and focus is on how can we get the best outcome for that bid — including mine. Even when I come in fully intending that you and your team will learn from me — and even if that’s your intention too —everything tends to be subsumed into the bigger objective, which is to get your important bid across the line.

In my experience, proposal skills development is a systematic process of enquiry and reflection that is best built away from the furnace of bid deadlines.

That’s why I offer public and professional Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class Programs that deliberately takes participants away from their day job — either for a couple of hours a week in the public program, or a couple of days in the professional program —to get the best results.

To improve your outcomes from bids and proposals through learning and development, I recommend training at least one senior person from your organisation who is going to be responsible for strategy and leading bids, and at least one other person who will be doing the proposal development, management and writing. These people need to work together and to support each other.  I have trained many proposal teams through the Master Class program, with great results.  The next public Master Class starts on May 2 and enrolments close on April 18.  Contact me if you’d like an overview of the syllabus for this very useful program.

Why Good Performance Isn't Enough To Retain An Important Contract

When I work with companies who are looking to re-compete for important contracts that they know will be coming up to RFT in 12 months’ time, one of the things that the bid team most often talks about is their operational performance. Of course operational performance is important. It’s what suppliers are being paid to do. But it isn't always the most important, particularly when customers are deciding whether you're worth keeping around for another contract term.

Have you ever heard of a phenomenon called “digital distraction”? Here are some startling examples that explain why looking at the thing that’s right under your nose isn’t always the best idea:

• In December last year, a Taiwanese tourist fell off the end of St. Kilda Pier in Melbourne because she was checking Facebook on her phone and not watching where she was going.  She was found by police 65 feet from the end of the pier, floating on her back in an attempt to keep her phone dry and safe — even though she couldn’t swim.
• Likewise, in August, a man drove off a bridge in Texas after sending this text message: “I need to quit texting because I could die in a car accident.”
• There have been some very serious cases of digital distraction, including a young child who drowned in the bath because the babysitter was looking at Facebook on her phone.

Of course, it’s not our mobile phones that are to blame — it’s the way we use them. It is very easy to be distracted by something that seems like it needs to be done in the here and now without looking at the bigger picture of what’s going on around us.

Likewise, operational performance is the most obvious and the easiest thing to focus on when delivering a services contract. But good performance is what we're being paid for - it's just a baseline expectation. As the RFT gets closer, the relative impact of operational performance is at its greatest and therefore maintaining performance tends to take up a lot of people’s time. There are, however, three other things that incumbents need to focus on — above and beyond operational performance — in order to retain important contracts.  And this work needs to start well before the RFT is released.

Every contract changes hands at some point. Whether it gets into your new, improved hands — or is snapped up by someone else —is really up to you. If you have an important services contract that is coming up for bid this year, contact me and let’s talk about what you and your team need to start focusing on now, over and above operational performance, to make sure you retain it.

Your Credentials Are Not a Sales Pitch – or Why Not to Fall in Love with Your Own Story

There’s more information in the market than ever before, but two things haven’t really changed.

The first is that customers really only care about their own pressing problems — the things that they are charged with figuring out or delivering within their own organisation.

The second is that the great majority of suppliers are, naturally, quite keen to sell their own products and services.

So, as a result, there is often a real disconnect in the way that suppliers deliver their message to customers.  Many “proposals” are really just credentials pieces that push the supplier’s story and assume that the customer will be able (and motivated) to read between the lines and see how that’s relevant to them. This is just showboating — it’s not an actual sales pitch.

The rise of competitive tenders has actually compounded this problem, because “proposal production” has become an assembly-line job that is delegated to the least experienced and least knowledgeable members of staff. A lot of the boilerplate information available to cut and paste into proposals is really just white noise to the customer, who is busy being kept awake by problems that suppliers don’t seem to understand and definitely don’t look like they have a solution for.

Too frequently, suppliers often become unhealthily attached to our own story, and it takes maturity and presence to know when it’s time to change a pitch we spent a lot of time and effort on.

In The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adams describe a pitch that a group of sales reps had spent six months putting together, and that they had to change on the fly to focus on the single issue the customer CEO had most on his mind the day they got a chance to see him.  It’s a good reminder that the sales pitch you prepared is not necessarily the one that the customer wants to hear — or the one that will actually end up closing the deal.

Dear Procurement: all I want for Christmas is…

Last December I ran this letter in the Winning Pitch, and it had the highest open rates of all my newsletters in 2012. So if you missed my Christmas letter to Procurement it, here it is again, with a few amendments to bring it up to date for 2013. Unfortunately, the bad news is that not much has changed in the buyer/supplier relationship in the past twelve months. The good news is that there is still room for improvement!

Here's hoping that the New Year brings more balance for all of us in the tendering system. No matter what side of the fence you sit on, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year :-)

Dear buyers,

You need stuff done; we know how to do things.  We need each other, and we really want to work with you to do great things together.

Unfortunately, the tendering system is turning us into adversaries, not collaborators. Like us, you are probably drowning under a pile of forms and schedules, and you must be wondering if there is a better way to make buying decisions.  We think there is.  Here is how, with only a few small adjustments, we can change this system for the better.

• Let us talk to you again. A tender isn't the only way to scope the market and for complex purchases, it really isn't the best option. So let’s have a chat. Things change quickly and you might be surprised about what we can do for you now that you haven't yet heard about. And, while we’re on the subject…
• Bring back Expressions of Interest.  If you want to assess potential suppliers on paper, why not use an EOI, rather than an RFT? These are short and reasonably straightforward for us to complete. They make us feel like we’re in with chance, and not like we are jumping over a very high hurdle for a very small likelihood of return.
• Say what you mean. Years have passed since the introduction of competitive tendering, but the tenders themselves haven't changed very much in all that time. They are often hard to interpret, and the evaluation criteria don’t always match the questions. With better instructions, any supplier with a bit of common sense will be able to bid confidently. That’s good for you, and it’s good for us.
• Timetable a response period that’s reasonable. We run a pretty tight ship these days; our staff are stretched and it can be difficult to keep up with complex RFT requirements and shrinking deadlines. Crunching us for time because you’re late to market only means you get rushed, poor quality submissions. On the other hand…
• Don’t issue a timetable and then grant a last-minute extension just before the deadline. This unfairly disadvantages (and discourages) the suppliers that are prepared, and have made it a priority to respond to your RFT.
• Please, answer our questions when we ask them. We think very hard before we submit questions about an RFT, because we don’t want to waste your time. But often, we don’t get meaningful answers (or sometimes, any answers). Better information will mean better proposals for you to evaluate.  And finally…
• Have a heart - don’t drop a tender on 21 December.  We know you like to come back to a full inbox, but we would like to see our families too.

There's no doubt the tendering system could work better, and together, we have the power to make it happen. 

You know, at the end of the day, we are all just people. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. So come meet some of us; we bet you will like what you see and hear.

With hope and best wishes for a Happy New Year, Your Prospective Suppliers

Why Exam Swots Make Good Bid Writers

It's been a long time since I was last at school, but in some ways it feels like I never left because my job involves developing bids and responding to tenders. Answering RFT questions often feels like you are sitting an exam every day of your life.

I'm often asked about the skills that are most needed in a bid writer, and how to identify aptitude in internal staff who might be good at that kind of work. Probably the most important is an ability to understand what's being asked for in the RFT, and to respond accordingly. Therefore, a good predictor of likely success in such a role is how good someone is (or has been) at exams, particularly in subjects requiring a complex written response.

Getting good exam marks requires the confidence to understand and interpret and unfamiliar questions very quickly and under time pressure; to plan a response that addresses that question; to identify relevant content and ignore stuff that isn’t relevant; and to weave an argument or point of view throughout. Therefore, a member of staff who has a good academic record with high exam scores in complex subjects is highly likely to be suited to the task of responding to tenders. It doesn't really matter what kind of subjects they were good at – it’s their pre-existing aptitude for this kind of work that is important.

I’ve just finished re-reading the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. In it, there is a character called Mma Makutsi, who is famous for having achieved 97% in her final exams at the Botswana Secretarial College. Mma Makutsi is the Assistant Detective to Chief Detective Mma Ramotswe, and together they are a force to be reckoned with. Mma Ramotswe has fantastic intuition, where Mma Makutsi is the person who dots the is and crosses the ts. I am willing to bet that if they weren’t in the detecting game, they would make a great bid team.

Likewise, in your business there is an important role for staff members that aren’t academic and don’t think of themselves as “writers”.These people are often great students of life, are good at reading between the lines and have useful insights customer behaviour. Therefore they make great proposal strategists who are good at seeing the big picture.

You need these big-picture proposal strategists, together with great bid writers who are good at the detail, to form the core of a successful bid team.

The Power Of Graphics For Page-Limited Submissions

This week, I’m coming to the end of a strategically significant bid process, working with a large team on a submission that has been in the making for a very long time. I will miss this delightful, talented and committed group of people very much when we hit “send” on the proposal next week. This is a consortium submission from incumbent suppliers pitching to retain a complex range of services worth tens of millions of dollars, and where dozens of people’s jobs are on the line.

Notwithstanding the bid’s complexity, the RFT response templates are — as always, it seems, these days — highly limited in what they will let us include. In one case, we have a total of three pages to cover our expertise, experience, and understanding of the service delivery need. Getting this message across within such tight word limits is extremely difficult, and we have used graphics extensively in this proposal to help overcome our space challenges.

Unfortunately lack of space in RFT responses is a trend that isn't going anywhere.  (Check out my blog post "Why Buyers Are Asking For Short Proposals").

Last year I ran a short program in conjunction with Colleen Jolly of 24 Hour Company in the USA on International Best Practice in Proposal Graphics.  Today, Colleen shared a link to an article written by Mike Parkinson — her colleague and the author of Billion Dollar Graphics — on the topic of Using Graphics in Page-Limited Proposals.

It seems Mike’s clients over in the USA are feeling the same pain as my team and I are feeling here. Mike says “RFPs often ask for the sun, moon, and stars in 10 pages. The challenge we face is when, where, and how do we add graphics to a 10-page proposal (that should be 40 pages to effectively answer the RFP)?”

If you’ve wondered about this yourself, check out Mike’s article where he discusses the reasons why graphics are easier to understand than text alone; why they get the point across more quickly than words; and how graphics reduce perceptions of risk.

Why buyers are asking for short proposals

Like me, you are probably seeing a lot more word and page-limited tender response requests coming out from the market these days. A quick check of the tenders I worked on over the past six months revealed that more than half had page limits for responding to each criterion. On the surface it makes sense as to why this might be happening. After all, if you're a procurement officer or a buyer and you're expecting dozens or hundreds of tender responses, you would want them to be as succinct as possible so that you don't have to wade through pages and pages of unnecessary information in order to score the response. Page limiting and word limiting proposals might reduce your workload by as much as 50%.

But there's another reason why it's a good practice to ask for word and page-limited responses.

That's because buyers understand that it actually takes much more effort to write something within a tight set of limits than it does when no limits are given.

There's a famous quote by the French mathematician, physicist, and inventor Blaise Pascal, who lived in the 17^th century. Pascal said, "I have made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

To me, that sums it up nicely. When suppliers are not limited in how much information they can provide, it's easy to just throw the kitchen sink into the bid and let the buyer sort it out. This has led to a lot of lazy, assembly line proposal writing.

Buyers know that they will get better quality responses if they force you to think about how you can make your proposal shorter. If you have less space and fewer words to get your point across, the good proposals will be better —and those that were never going to be any good anyway at least won't be as tiring or taxing to assess.

Proposal writing tip: should I use italics, underlining and bold text?

When you're making a pitch to a customer with a limited attention span, it's best not to do anything that is going to distract them from the point you are trying to make. Sprinkling italics, underlining and bold text throughout your narrative may seem appealing as a way to garner attention, but can actually end up breaking the flow of narrative.

If you want a piece of text to stand out, try using headlines, bullet points, or breakout boxes instead.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding - Part 1

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders — who often believe we are talking to an audience that is already sold on what we do — could learn a lot from. Crowdfunding is a social media platform through which millions of dollars have been raised for projects as diverse as a Parma and pot at the local pub ($259 against a target of $20) to millions of dollars of fan funding for a movie version of the TV series Veronica Mars. In the crowdfunding world, the only measure of a project’s worth is whether people will stump up money for it. Most crowdfunding goes to projects that it would be difficult - if not impossible - to get traditional funding for.

There is definite hierarchy in the business of raising money to do stuff.

At the top are products and services that are deemed essential to corporate or public life.  These are funded by governments or businesses through contracts and agreements.

In the middle are traditional grants, where hopefuls parade their wares in front of an entity that has money and is prepared to give some of it away (generally a large corporation, charitable foundation or private donor).

Crowdfunding is at the very bottom of this pyramid.  This is a very interesting place to be, in that crowdfunders are talking to a very wide audience that may or may not have any money - and even if they do, have no intention at the moment of giving any of it away. This forces crowdfunders to put their project in front of everyone they know in a way that is so inspiring that it will prompt them to immediately pull out their credit card.

Check out Part 2 of this article for my top four lessons for contract bidders from the most successful crowdfunders.

Evidence-based Bid Pricing webinar

This month I talked to Greg Eyres of InforValue about how organisations can derive more profit from customer contracts through a smarter approach to bid pricing. The resulting webinar on Evidence-based Bid Pricing is now available to view in Greg’s Resource Centre.

Greg is one of only a handful of specialists in the world that practice in the area of Tender Pricing and his work has dramatically influenced the bid success of some of the largest companies in the world, including Motorola, CSC and IBM. Greg has also developed a number of patents in this space and his articles on tender pricing have been published in industry publications including Informs Journal, Frontiers in Services and Shortlist. Recently, Greg developed KPrice - the world’s only evidence-based pricing tool suite designed specifically for tendering. A Chartered Accountant by training, Greg now consults on Tender Pricing issues around the Asia-Pacific region.

In this webinar, Greg shares a number of interesting case studies that demonstrate the dramatic effect of evidence-based bid pricing on the success of pursuits. For example, Greg and his team were once able to convince the client to increase their $60 million budget by 25%, due to the weight of evidence they had acquired about the true cost of providing the service.

Proposal writing tip: why your great track record isn't a free pass to reinstatement

When you’ve done similar work for a client, and done it well – sometimes for many years – it’s tempting to think this is all you need to talk about to win again. Unfortunately, when reduced to writing, your great track record only explains who you were yesterday; not who you are today and who you’re planning to be tomorrow.

Talk about your track record, but don’t rest on it. Explain how the client will derive future value from what you’ve done before - in reduced risk, higher quality, know-how and IP.

The first sale is to yourself

What goes through your mind when you’re faced with a big, juicy opportunity that you would really love to win? Requests for Tender present exactly that kind of opportunity. The pot of gold that a huge contract might bring looks as shiny and enticing as a lotto win. On the flip side, there’s sky-high anxiety when teams are forced to re-compete for business already worth millions to them – and that competitors now also have the opportunity to bid for.

Because competing for business is so stressful, pretty much everyone’s first reaction is to start babbling about themselves and why they deserve to win. Left unchecked, the proposal will reflect that kind of shallow, self-centred thinking and the underlying current of anxiety it came from. This is very off-putting to buyers, who - like the rest of us - are wired to tune out at the first sign of a sales pitch.

Jakob Nielsen, an expert in website usability, did an experiment to measure the way that writing style affects selling on the web. He concluded that “promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users, who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts. When people read a paragraph that starts ‘Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions,’ their first reaction is ‘no, it's not!’, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.”

Therefore, when you’re writing a proposal to convince a buyer, the first and most important sale is to yourself. It’s essential to take the time to define your proposal strategy - what the customer most wants, what you can best deliver, and what positions you most favourably against competitors. This gives you access to the most powerful competitive weapon you could ever have; belief in your ability to make a difference for the customer.

Despite this, most organisations don’t have a good methodology to define proposal strategy. It’s common to see less than 5% of proposal development time devoted to strategy, and this usually amounts to kicking around “our points of difference” - the output from which then gets translated into the proposal as some kind of laundry list titled “Why You Should Choose Us.”  Unfortunately, our enthusiasm for ourselves will never be as compelling as enthusiasm for what the customer wants to achieve and how we can help them to achieve it. Or as Dale Carnegie puts it in How To Win Friends and Influence People, "the only way on earth to influence others is to talk to them about what they want and show them how to get it."

The Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class provides many valuable tools and techniques to help you to develop your proposal from the customer’s point of view. For example, you will be trained in my Bid Strategy and Purchaser Value Topics Development Methodology, which is licensed and used by organisations in very competitive industries that consistently win almost everything they bid for. Watch the video to find out more.

Proposal writing tip: how to use case studies effectively

Case studies are an important source of evidence when substantiating claims of past performance in similar contracts. However, they will always have more impact if you can include them in the body of your proposal, and not just attached as a sheaf of project data sheets.

For example, look for opportunities to introduce case studies as an illustration of how you have successfully delivered a particular aspect of your methodology.

Nine ways to slice and dice competitors

Competition is a reality of business life. As long as there are contracts to be won, deals to be done, and money to be made, you can bet that there will be others apart from you who will be interested. Pitching for business is always a stressful exercise. Much of the stress actually comes from the fact that we are being judged against others and might be found wanting, rather than from the more obvious pressures of meeting the deadlines and the customer's requirements.

It's not always possible to know exactly how many competitors you are up against, or the strength of that competition, but one thing you can be certain of is that you won't be the only supplier in contention for the job.  When you already have the business and want to retain it, this thought can be terrifying.

So while it’s tempting to pull the covers over your head and hope they'll go away, these particular bogeymen could stand in the way of a lucrative contract. Let's shine a flashlight in those dark corners to see what might be lurking there.

When I work on bids with my clients, I’ve noticed that almost all of them think of their competitors as the firms or organisations that are the closest match to themselves – what I call “peer competitors”. Often there is a tendency to underestimate the field of competition as a result. So here are nine other ways to slice and dice potential competitors that might pose a threat to your ability to win:

1. National firms, if you are local
2. Local firms, if you are national
3. Much larger or much smaller firms
4. Firms that already work with your customers in another capacity
5. Firms with expertise in an area of current or future interest to the buyer
6. Firms with expansion plans that include your market space
7. Potential partnerships among competitors, including joint ventures and consortia
8. Offshore and multinational competitors, and
9. The buyer themselves – they might do nothing, spend their money on other priorities, or decide to do it themselves.