One of the best ways to increase your win rate – is to reduce your lose rate

We never promise to increase the win rate of a client – that would be absurd. What we can do, however, is help them reduce their lose rate. And that, perhaps, amounts to exactly the same thing.

For every yin, there must be a yang.

Similarly, for every bid that is lost because the solution was not good enough or the price was too high, there are bids and pitches which are lost simply because their authors failed to write an impressive enough document.

It’s not a great reason to lose a bid – especially if this has an adverse effect on the bottom line of the business. After all, it’s one thing to write a poor document; it’s another thing entirely to do positive harm to your organisation.

Obviously, when we work with clients, we can’t improve their products or services; neither can we influence the price they are charging. But we absolutely can reduce the number of times that they lose due to their inability to articulate a compelling proposition. Or to answer a complex bid question properly. Or because they simply can’t proofread properly.

And for some companies, that amounts to much the same thing.

There are several ways good writing, and good writing processes, can increase your win rate by reducing your lose rate. Here are some of the most common:

Good writing helps you articulate a winning competitive message in the executive summary

Too many organisations write executive summaries which say little more than ‘yes, we can do what you ask’ and ‘yes, we have done it well for others in the past’. On the surface this looks fine – you’re compliant. But is that really enough? The problem, of course, is that the prospect wouldn’t have asked you to tender if they hadn’t thought you were capable of doing the work. That means that your competitors will be able to say much the same things. Being compliant is just not enough. What’s required is to work out why you are uniquely qualified to get the work. This creates a particularly challenging writing environment which is best addressed by structuring an executive summary around some very robust competitive messaging. (It’s why we prefer to call executive summaries ‘executive propositions’ by the way.)

Good writing enables you to optimise the scoring when answering complex bid questions

Most questions in RFPs are marked according to set of clear scoring guidelines. These are usually published, along with the question itself. Logically, therefore, it should be a fairly straight forward task to deconstruct the question and then reconstruct the perfect – and therefore highest scoring – answer. But theory is one thing; practice is so often another. Knowing how to deconstruct a question and then create a written document – properly structured to score top marks – is another. It’s a writing challenge that involves a different type of messaging, the correct structure and a writing style that is designed for scan readers.

Writing processes can give you much more time

Bids are driven by deadlines. Too often, however, the first draft of a response is only shown to internal approvers a day or two before the submission date. By this time it is often too late to address serious gaps or a lack of competitive positioning (or, if it is possible, it’s only possible if all members of the team are prepared to work through the night rewriting the document). Fortunately, there is a better way! The answer is to change the way teams collaborate on a document using a proper storyboarding process. Done in the right way, this can transform the quality of the document, as well as the productivity of an entire writing team.

Good writing enables you to sound trustworthy

Tone of voice is another writing area of huge importance. If you’re in the business of persuasion, it matters, for example, that you write in a positive, active voice rather than a passive one. Similarly, a good executive summary should reflect a genuine respect for the reader. Even if you have a great competitive message and a powerful structure, it is so easy to lose trust – and with some kinds of opportunity, possibly the entire bid – simply because the final proposal is full of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and inconsistencies. It gives the impression that the writer – and therefore your company – simply doesn’t care and, therefore, should not to be trusted.

 

Read more about writing for bids:

Executive summaries? Or executive propositions?

Paul Ayling is the founder and CEO of Writing Machine.