7
Priority 3 – Externalise business development efforts 123
2 Focus on them
Too many proposals begin with a rambling outline of a company’s history
and background and a whole host of irrelevant facts and gures about the
organisation. This is often followed up with nothing more than a list of the
various services and products offered.
Your prospect is not really interested in you or your business, other than
what benets you can bring to them. It is vital, therefore, that in writing
your proposal you refer to them a lot and specically to their requirements
and how what you have to offer will benet them.
3 Establish credibility
When the prospects read through the various proposals they know that it
is a promotional document and that all tendering organisations will ‘puff’
themselves up to make themselves sound fantastic. The proposals that
consistently do well are those that give proof statements to add credibility
to any claims made. So, for example, if you are claiming substantial experi-
ence give actual gures to illustrate. Explain how many years, how many
customers, track record of results, etc.
Don’t just talk about quality of service provided, actually include testi-
monials from satised customers. Purely by way of example here is one I
recently received with regard to a tender I worked on for an organisation:
‘Ian, We just wanted to say a big thanks for the help and support on our recent
tender, which as you now know was successful. Your guidance, advice, drafting
support and overall contribution played a signicant part in ensuring that we won this
tender. This was a big and very important piece of business for the rm and your
involvement was an integral part in the success of our bid.’
So, go out and ask for testimonials.
4 Keep in mind who you are writing the tender for
If you’re writing a proposal as part of a competitive process, ask yourself
this vital question: who am I writing this for? The temptation of course is to
give the obvious answer, which is the company or business that has invited
tenders. In practice, however, that is not the case. The correct answer is the
specic individual that you need to inuence who will have the biggest say
in any decision-making.
Therefore it is important to try to nd out who the decision-making person
or people will be and then to do as much homework as possible to nd out
whatever you can about them and their preferred style.
124 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
5 Have a summary of benets
I was asked by a director of a business to read through a proposal docu-
ment his organisation had just prepared and to give him some feedback.
Having read the document, my question was: what are the most compel-
ling reasons why you as a business should be chosen? He told me that this
information was in the proposal. Indeed it was, but to nd these reasons I
had to wade through 41 pages of text.
With this in mind make sure that on the rst page of any competitive pro-
posal you write, you have a summary of benets so that whoever is reading
it is able instantly to see what the most powerful reasons are. Make sure this
summary is not more than two pages, has clear headings and lots of space
to emphasise the elements you want to be seen.
6 Get feedback after the process
Win or lose, make sure that you do everything you possibly can to try to
nd out in detail how your proposal was perceived.
If you were successful then you need to try to nd out which elements of
your proposal had the most inuence. If you were not, then you need to
understand what else you could have done.
What are the major traps?
Failure to differentiate from the competition
Too many businesses simply provide factual information about themselves
and give a low price. This gives the prospect the challenge of working out for
themselves why they should choose your business. If there is nothing to dif-
ferentiate you from your competitors other than price then you either won’t
win the contract or you will but for the wrong reasons and regret it later.
Failure to tailor the proposal
Many organisations take the easy way out when it comes to preparing
proposals. They immediately dive into the computer and pull up proposals
that they may have written in the past, even if they have been unsuccessful
ones! They then use the ‘nd and replace’ function on their computer to
change a few names and facts here and there.
While there may be some generic material that can be adapted, you should
assume that a very high percentage needs to be tailored to the very specic
requirements of your prospect.
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