Persuasive Content in your Proposals
Writing a bid document is a competitive task. Many people forget this and only concentrate on impressing the customer.
Anne Farr
Keeping your Tenders Meaningful
When you are presenting your proposal, ensure your language is correct, meaningful and cannot be misinterpreted. Avoid the use of words like ‘frequently’, and ‘quality’. If you use these, the reader will assume you are deliberately trying to be evasive.
Readability Test
There are several tests which gauge the readability of a document. These include Flesch-Kincaid, ARI and Coleman-Liau.
Incumbent Bidding
As the incumbent, you hold a unique position when tendering and this should be used to maximum advantage.
Generic Text in Your Bid Proposals
If you rely heavily on generic text when writing a proposal you are likely to be seen as lazy or lacking customer focus.
Reading the Whole Question
When an invitation to tender sets out specific questions for you to answer, you should take note of the wording they use.
Presentation in Bid Documents
The way a document looks can be as important as the words it contains.
Corporate Branding
For those with a technical background, branding guidelines sometimes feel unnecessarily restrictive. It is, however, important that a finished document is presentable and well laid out.
Long Winded Documents
A sentence which runs over several lines may be grammatically perfect but is likely to be unnecessarily complex and include several sub clauses which mean the reader has to concentrate extremely hard to understand the meaning and thus increase the chance that they will stop reading before they reach the full stop at the end of the sentence.
Avoid Personal Bias
Bidding for work you will not win is a waste of time and demotivating for staff.
