Writing Business Bids and Proposals For Dummies. Cobb Neil

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proposal’s look and language so it reflects the customer’s brand, its colors, its imagery, and its logo. Go easy on the boilerplate, and customize your source material to better reflect your customer’s working environment.

      

One way to “think customer” is to identify the pain the customer goes through as a result of the problem you want to solve. When you identify the most pressing, emotionally charged needs and clearly depict the pain they cause, you’re said to be pushing the customer’s hot buttons (for more about hot buttons, see Chapter 2). These are the most meaningful issues to your customer and the reasons a customer will buy. Downplay your solution’s features (what it does) and play up the benefits (what your customer gets or can do from the solution) instead. If you can show that you alone can provide that single benefit that solves the customer’s hot-button problem, you’ll win the deal (see Chapters 7 and 9 for guidance on how to develop and write feature and benefit statements).

       Gathering and providing the right information

      

Seeing things through your customers’ eyes is the difference between complying with your customers’ requirements and truly responding to their needs. Compliant proposals can win; responsive proposal do win. How do you figure out what your customers need? You ask a lot of questions.

      You won’t know your customer’s hot buttons if you don’t gather the right information. How do you do this (especially when you’re not the salesperson and never escape the back office)? If your opportunity is proactive, you ask questions. You ask the customer. If your company won’t let you, you ask the customer rep or the customer support tech. You ask thoughtful, probing questions that get to the heart of the customer’s problem, and you listen closely to the answers so you can write like the customer talks.

      If you’re responding to an RFP, you do all the above and shred the RFP. By shredding, we mean parsing, or separating, every requirement as a stand-alone topic to address in your response. Sometimes, that’s easy: Just follow the number scheme that the customer provides in the RFP. But sometimes, customers are sneaky. They bury requirements, using trigger words like will, shall, must, and should to indicate that a requirement follows. Some sophisticated proposal groups use parsing software to find all the incidents. Some still use multicolor highlighters as a shredding tool. Either way can be effective (and one is definitely cheaper, if a lot slower). For a detailed look at shredding an RFP and building a compliant and responsive proposal from the results, see Chapter 4.

       Getting the better of your competitors

      Competitive analysis is a legal business discipline that uses a variety of public sources and tools to help you choose the right strategy for setting yourself apart from your competitors. Check out your competitors’ websites to discover their latest product information and market strategies. Use social media to track your competitors’ claims and trending interests. If you have the funds, subscribe to competitive assessment research sites or reports.

      

Another way to capture knowledge about your rivals is to hold a competitor review with employees in your company who compete with or perhaps even work alongside them. You can explain the opportunity and collect insights and new perspectives. Your business may be one of those that finds new employees by luring them away from competitors. Ask around and talk with any colleagues who have recently worked for a competitor to discover whatever you can about the way it does business.

      Your goal as proposal writer is to shine a bright light on your competitors’ weaknesses while subtly touting your strengths. We proposal writers call that “ghosting” the competition. You can take the information you gather from your sources and prepare a SWOT analysis (which assesses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to create powerful discriminators for your solution and ghosting statements for your proposal. For more on creating persuasive content from your competitive analysis, see Chapters 5 and 7.

       Using the proposal as a communication platform

      Your goal in gathering customer and competitor information is to build tactics for creating a long-term and mutually beneficial business relationship, not just a one-and-done customer-vendor agreement. Use your initial work on a given opportunity to help establish a comprehensive communication plan for a particular company or even industry. For instance, what you learn from one engagement may

      ❯❯ Uncover a need for conceptual proposals for longer-range and multi-staged projects

      ❯❯ Enable you to establish customer-focused content for private websites and social media messaging

      ❯❯ Open doors for producing executive-level communiqués that open a dialogue with senior management perhaps, providing status on in-progress projects and forecasting future needs – both of which can result in more winning proposals

       Deciding to bid (or not)

      The bid/no-bid decision is the last action you take in the pre-proposal stage. It’s the last chance for you to bail before putting your resources behind a deal. You need to use the information from your customer investigation and SWOT analysis to make this either/or decision.

      

You need to make sure you have the following:

      ❯❯ A solution that can win over all others

      ❯❯ Proof that you can deliver the solution as your customer requires

      ❯❯ A strong win theme that addresses your customer’s hot buttons

      ❯❯ Commitment from your company to dedicate the resources you need to develop the proposal and win the bid

      You can find more about bid/no-bid decisions in Chapter 6.

       Developing your proposal from cover to cover

      Next comes the proposal development stage. This is where you do the bulk of your work over four phases – strategizing, planning, writing, and publishing.

      During the strategizing phase, you take the needs and vision of a customer, the products, services, and vision of your company, and the skills and insights of a team of specialists, and blend them into a cohesive argument that satisfies both the intellect and the heart of the decision maker. Planning is where you establish the structure of your proposal argument and the material you’ll use to support your argument. Writing is where you craft your descriptions, arguments, and get them ready to be published. And publishing is creating the physical or digital copies of the proposal and delivering it to the customer.

      

Proposal writers bring value to an organization in many ways, but none more so than by directing proposal development resources in the proposal development stage, working within the time constraints of a particular opportunity. Proposal writers may be better termed proposal managers at this point because they’re the glue that holds the whole operation together.

      The

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