What a good waiter can tell us about writing a winning proposal

What can waiters tell us about persuasion? Well, how often has you tip altered depending on the quality of service? How often has your order changed depending on the recommendations of the waiter? And was you judgement about repeat business affected by the person who was your primary contact?

Successful food servers are not just good at increasing the size of their tips - they also improve the revenue for the restaurant by providing a service that is firstly good quality and personable (making people come back again) but by also making recommendations on what people should eat and drink - ever paid more than you intended for that bottle of wine because the waiter recommended it? Research also shows that repeating customer orders back increases tip size...as does how you give people sweets at the end of the meal. I'll be looking at that in my next book review "Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion".

Bad service drives me crazy in a restaurant. And I have no idea why restaurant owners put up with it - I'm sure that the main reason people don't return to restaurants is poor service. What's that got to do with proposals?

Well, look at your proposal as if it were a meal and the client was the diner...stay with me here...would you return to the restaurant? Or put it this way, does your proposal look after the client? Are they going to feel that even though you have recommended something expensive, perhaps even more expensive than they had intended paying, that it was worth it? Does your proposal give them a positive experience and value for money?

Or does it give them indigestion and make them feel as if they never want to eat there again?

How about repeating an order back? Tips increase, which shows greater customer satisfaction. Look at your proposals and be sure that you have accurately reflected the client requirement. Does anything annoy your more than receiving the wrong order because the waiter wasn't paying attention? No. So don't propose a solution that doesn't meet the client's requirement.

Feel free to recommend something better. They value your expertise in this area and want your opinion. And bear in mind, that a more expensive "five star" option makes a less expensive "standard" solution look more affordable...the restaurant knows this by putting all those expensive wines and champagnes on the wine list...all of a sudden you think that £30 for a bottle of wine isn't so bad after all.

People reward good experiences and avoid returning to places they have had a bad one. Make sure your proposal reflects our client's needs and concerns and makes recommendations for a solution. Go on and provide good service and they will want to come back.

There are lots of successful businesses out there that operate in different spheres and ways than yours or mine. But shouldn't be able to look at what makes them successful and integrate some of those features in our business to help us succeed?

Why not try it? Otherwise you may be heading the same way as that dodgy restaurant that you ate at last week.

how to write a business proposal when you are a small business

Big businesses take writing business proposals seriously. Why? because big contracts are offered particularly by the public sector?

On the radio this morning I heard that in the UK over 80% of public sector IT projects are awarded to only 5 of the largest consultancies. Not that a company with 150 staff is going to attempt to win a contract for national identity cards, but the size of the contract means that the proposal itself can have a budget of millions of pounds to put together. This is a huge project, requiring a large number of people, organisation and a lot of time and effort to produce the tender.

Procurement in the public sector has become more professional and needs to be demonstrably fair. So the procurement process is complex on large projects and that same diligence is required on smaller projects that require written proposals.
 
Small businesses also need to write proposals - OK, smaller proposals. But in a small business a contract worth £250,000 can be a big piece of work - one that makes the difference between keeping people and letting them go. It's important then that the proposal is professional and accurate. But this needs an equivalent amount of resource to organise, plan and execute.

Yet, even with a dedicated sales team there is often adequate resource to write a proposal. I've written before about the differences in sales people and proposal development. Here is my generalisation: sales people are, for the most part, not great at planning the resources and time required to write proposals to the best ability of the company. This usually manifests itself by not doing anything about an RFP for three weeks, then rushing to get it finished in time.

Why can't a small business use the tactics and approaches of big business in their proposals? Well they can. You may not have the ability to have a strategic proposal centre, with staff just dedicated to writing proposals, but you can do one of two things.

1) Appoint one of your project managers or administrators to be in charge of proposal planning. They should be involved in the weekly sales meeting and plan the resources required to complete each proposal and set deadlines to ensure work is completed on time and early enough to be quality checked and amendments made.

This doesn't need to be a central bid team - all the proposal development can be done by staff in their normal jobs. It's just leaving the project management to a professional. After all, how many CEOs would put their star sales person in charge of their most important project? Not many...yet the sales projects they are working on will be the most important projects in the company next year.

2) If you can't spare the project manager, then you need to improve the planning of the sales team. At the sales meeting don't just look at probabilities, proposals in development and when projects will be closed - every proposal opportunity should require a detailed plan to be produced by the sales person. The first half of the meeting should be the traditional sales meeting and the second half reviewing the proposal plans, resources required and progress.

Small businesses often rely on the can-do, multi-skilled approach and attitude of their staff. Yet the success of big business says play as a team because it makes you stronger. Find ways to help your proposals be from a structured, planned team and they will be better.

If you have a small business and want help to make this happen in your organisation, then get in touch with Learn to Write Proposals.
 

Writing business propsoals with unique selling points

I recently reviewed Can I Change Your Mind? The Craft and Art of Persuasive Writing by Lindsay Camp - a book that's as enjoyable as it is useful.

One of the things that Camp mentions is that in marketing messages there is always the hunt for a unique selling point or USP. Yet, there might not always be one. You can have a perfectly good product, that works well, is efficient and has a good price - but your competition may have something very similar.

It's the same in proposals. We look for that competitive edge  and differentiators to create win themes in our proposal. But sometimes we can put pressure on ourselves to come up with something completely unique that actually...might not be so unique. Perhaps you aren't the only organisation that has a 24-hour UK call centre or a 10-year guarantee or providing shocking-pink high-visibility vests for construction workers (USPs aren't always going to get you more business by themselves).

Camp talks instead about a "competitive promise" - factors that will help change the client's mind. Start off with your single strongest claim and tell the story of why it matters - what difference will it make to them.

Don't dismiss USPs if you have them, but it's worth thinking as well about what are the combinations of factors - that may including "softer" or people related factors that would make clients choose you rather than the competition when you write your business proposal.

Learn to Write Proposals book review: Can I Change Your Mind? The Craft and Art of Persuasive Writing by Lindsay Camp

This is a fun and informative book, one that gives good, sensible advice from someone with years of experience yet dispensed in an informal way that makes some of the more humorous parts feel as they've been told to you by the office sage over a pint after work has finished on Friday afternoon.

I'm not trying to put it down in an intellectual sense; in fact I literally didn't put it down until I'd finished reading it. If you've read some of my other book reviews you'll realise that I like books that are accessible. Ones that give you quality information but not in a stuffy academic manner. When I write proposals I want my message to be easily understood, not overcomplicated. And that's how I like my books. I like this one.

Camp separates his book into three sections: Persuasive Principles; A Persuasive Writing A- Z; and Persuasive Words at Work.

The first section isn't a how-to, but it is a valuable explanation of what persuasive writing is and what it should do. Camp bases it around his guiding theory of the "Three Rs of Persuasive Writing":

 

Remember the Reader and the Result

It's good advice and Camp even explains his understanding of the readership of this book. Not one that you may have thought. He specifically says he doesn't expect his reader to be someone who is a persuasive writing professional - rather it is anyone who wants to communicate better through the written word. He also encourages you to never lose what you want the end result of your writing to be.

The A - Z section falls somewhere between a catalogue of tips relating to section one and a style guide. If you are like me, you'll find some of the embedded examples very funny. I loved this one:

Malapropisms

Never use a word unless you're 100% certain of its meaning. We've all been tempted to do it - to make ourselves sounds more grandiloquent and meretricious.

But it nearly always turns out crapulously.

Camp doesn't mind saying it the way he calls it, which is usually very funny. He even manages a little dig at Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss - explaining that there's "no room for pedantry in relation to punctuation - or anything else". 

Personally, I don't mind this dig. Whereas I read this book in one go, I find Eats, Shoots and Leaves totally unreadable and completely self-defeating in any aims to improve the quality of writing and communication. How many of you bought that book and never finished it, never mind not learning anything from it?

Back to Can I Change Your Mind? The last section is a stroll through camps creative and writing process. He's not trying to give a magic formula, but rather a realistic insight in what it's like to work as a creative writer and how you might be able to use the information in your writing.

There's another theme throughout the book. One of the very things that make it readable, and that's rhythm. Camp explains and demonstrates with examples how words become more readable with good rhythm. He gives us a phrase:

Trousers for women
Trousers for men

and asks us to say them aloud, and then say them the other way round. Camp explains that the more satisfying way is as written because it ends on a stressed syllable. Try it. It works. Every time.

But the best example of the rhythm of writing, writing that's easy to read, that flows, that makes sense without overwhelming the reader is the book itself. It's clever, but not too clever for its own good and has a lot of tips that I believe will make an instant impact on anyone’s writing.

It's a good read...even if you don't write. All in all, a Learn to Write Proposals recommended read.

Buy it now from Amazon: Can I Change Your Mind? The Craft and Art of Persuasive Writing

Proposal writing and relationships

When you write a proposal how much contact do you have with the organisation that it's been submitted to?

Perhaps you are the Account Manager, in charge of the account and the bid. But perhaps you are a software developer asked to contribute to an important part of the bid, yet have no real connection with the client. In this case the client seems a long way off: Software Developer-Bid Team-Account Manager-Client.

It may be that the developer writes some really good technical input into the proposal, but the chances are they won't unless they are really brought into the bid team and feel as if they are part of the proposal development.

In an ideal world when writing business proposals it would be great to have all the bid team meet with their counterparts at the client organisation so they can see and understand first hand how things need to fit together. Then a co-ordinated response can be developed, with everyone singing off the same hymn sheet (or at least from the same executive summary).

Even if this level of commitment isn't possible - and we have all been in situations where members of the extended proposal team simply don't have the time to spend as long as we'd like on a proposal - there are other ways of bringing these team members closer to the bid. Put yourself in their shoes; you are busy doing project work and someone you maybe don't know very well asks for your help in writing some content about something. You don't have much time, you don't really know what it's about and so you get it done, out of the way and back onto your project.

So how do you involve these important people in your tender response without costing them a lot of time? Easy. Get them to come to a short proposal kick-off meeting, where the big picture is explained. Send them emails about the proposal from the client. Ask them for their help on the solution, not just to write up a section on an already decided solution. If it's possible, give them direct access to the client to ask questions - it removes those degrees of separation that exist.

There are ways of getting your proposal team not just involved, but truly committed to your proposals. Treat people like they are an afterthought and that's exactly what you'll get back from them for your proposal.

Expenses and proposals

So as we look on at the train wreck of MPs expenses, let's ask ourselves why we are all fed up.

OK - these are publicly elected officials that appear to have been creating their own little secret club with many perks.

There are lots of questions. Why are these things not taxed as perks? Why if you were so busy, did everyone seem to manage to claim too much on their expenses, was there anyone who under claimed? When I'm busy, I'm not claiming anything...they are the last thing I get around to doing. And just because a rule allows something, doesn't mean that rule has to be exploited does it? Where does an individual's sense of right and wrong step in?

OK - what's this to do with a proposals blog?

Expenses to most people are reimbursable costs that they initially pay out of their own pocket before claiming back, not a series of entitlements. This is what you would expect as an employer and as a client organisation you also have a right to know what constitutes reasonable expenses.

When working on a project you have occasional expenses outside the core costs of your business - transportation, accommodation, hospitality etc. But are these the cost of doing business or are they extra for the project? Do you list probable expenses as an additional cost in your proposal or absorb them into your standard business overheads?

I've submitted proposals where outside of the financials I've said something along the lines that expenses will be charged for necessary travel and associated costs that occur due to this project, usually providing an estimate and saying that they won't exceed this. The Project Manager is responsible for keeping track of the evidence and submitting this to the clients for reimbursement.

I've never had a client have a problem with this, but I used to have a client whose policy was to charge a 20% administration charge on all expenses. Clients generally raised an eyebrow at this, because just like MPs it looks as if you are trying to profit from expenses. In this case the business calculated that the costs of processing expense reports was around 20% of the cost of the expenses, so they weren't profiting, just ensuring they didn't lose money.

But some things are the cost of doing business and businesses want to know they are receiving good value. Having the appearance of trying to make money doesn't build trust and good faith. It's important that throughout every aspect of your proposal what you are communicating and the impact (positive, negative, financial) is clearly discernable from the information you have provided.

It's a lesson that some members of parliament are going to learn the hard way - perception is reality. So make the perception of your submissions clear, explicit and fair. If you don't you may win one piece of work, but I bet you'll never work with that client again.

Budget leaks, Formula One and proposal

We get constant trails and leaks about what is going to be in the upcoming budget...I guess it makes sure that there aren't too many surprises coming up, which is why it's done - to manage expectations and even to get a sense about what the reaction will be.

In Formula One  meanwhile, we had a few teams who interpreted rules differently, sought clarification and still came up with different solutions; all it turns out, within the rules.

What has this got to do with anything?

In each case there has been a consultation of a kind. A consultation that results in important changes and decisions being made which are key to the success of in one case a sports team and in the other a goverment and a country.

So when we have a proposal to submit, how often do you consult with the issuing body to get clarification, get a meeting or even to test out or ideas beforehand. Of course sometimes, especially in public tendering you may be prohibited from this, but it's always worth asking.

There's a lot at stake, so when you can don't waste an opportunity to get your ideas in front of the people who evaluate, get feedback and develop you proposals in the winning direction. If it's good enough for the government (and more to the point Formula One!) it's good enough for the rest of us.