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Pinpoint Proposals

“insights and strategies for effective tender and proposal writing, from one of Australia's most experienced tendering professionals”

June 29, 2011 New A few simple rules

Apparently authored by Frank L. Visco, a vicepresident of USAdvertising, and originally published in Writer’s Digest in June 1986:

 

Simple rules for effective writing

June 28, 2011 Re-use, Re-hash, Re-cycle

We need to make an admission here. We’ve all done it, and we need to admit it. We’ve all seen that question, nestled in a labyrinthine Request For Something-or-other, asking us about our Alignment to the State Government Code Of Practice on the Application of Widgets, and thought to ourselves the horrible, dangerous and yes, downright evil thought:

“What did we write last time?”

Put your hands up, you in the back, I can see you.

We’ve hunted down that block of prose, we’ve changed a few words around, done a find and replace on the old client’s name and slammed it in, 47 hours before deadline at 11pm on a Tuesday and it kind of sort of maybe halfway answered the question and job’s right and good enough for government work.

Right?

Right?

Keep your hands up.

And then, then we LEAVE IT IN. Because it kind of sort of vaguely answers the question and we REALLY NEED TO TELL THEM about our exciting value add and our overarching client engagement words of power philosophy matrix. And we start to read past it, because it’s there and it looks like it’s the right length and our eyes are glazing and it’s 11pm on a Thursday and the General Manager of Applied Alchemical Astrolabes NEEDS to see a draft by start of business tomorrow.

And we stop reading it.

And it stays in.

And it’s the same as it was last time.

Only last time, you changed a few words and you did a find and replace on the client name, and you dropped it in because it fit and you stopped reading it.

And the time before that, only you changed a section about location and did a find and replace on South Australia.

And eventually what we end up with is a block of text that’s absolutely fine in every respect, that answers the question and fills in the gap and lets you tick that box on your tender response completion checklist.

As long as you don’t read it

But that’s exactly what the evaluator’s going to do.

The evaluator’s going to sit down, with 4, or 17 or 38 responses to the section on Alignment to the State Government Code Of Practice on the Application of Widgets. And 3 or 16 or 37 of them are going to be a block of text with a quick find and replace. And 3 or 16 or 37 of them are going to kind of sort of semi make sense. And those responses are going to get a passing score.

But one, just one, of your competitors, will have written their answer from scratch. They will have thought about the question, thought about the client, thought about WHY the client is asking that question and they will have written their response, in an order that makes sense, and with callbacks to their key win themes, and with specific reference to the client’s major problems.

And they are going to get a better score than you.

So next time you find yourself, at 9pm on a Wednesday, trawling through previous responses looking for something that’s vaguely analogous to what you’re being asked, with your fingers hovering over Ctrl-C, stop. Think.

By all means, grab your most recent response that comes close to the answer you’re going to provide, but then take the extra four minutes and rewrite the passage, word by word, line by line.

Your prose will be cleaner, your point will be clearer.

And you’ll be the one getting extra points on evaluation.

 

June 16, 2011 Six simple rules

I’m a firm proponent of simplicity in writing. I believe that one’s job, as a writer, is to convey information, and that writing simply is the best way to do that.

By trying to write “fancy”, you risk unnecessarily cluttering the narrative, and making it harder for your audience to work out what you’re trying to say.

Many, many years ago (in 1946!), George Orwell thought exactly the same thing, and wrote an essay, “Politics and the English Language“. In it, Orwell sets out six rules for clear writing, and it’s these rules that I follow, every day.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Personally, I love the idea that his last rule is “break all the other rules if you need to”, but I think, all these years later, we could all stand to look at our writing and say, for each sentence and paragraph, “did I say that as simply and concisely as possible, or did I let style override substance?”

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July 9, 2010 Of lights and tunnels

People, it would seem, could be forgiven for thinking I’d died.

Certainly, in terms of my devotion and work ethic when concerning this blog, that would seem to be the case.

Nothing, my friends, could be further from the truth.

The truth being, naturally, that priorities shifted slightly, and that I have been, for the last little while, deeply ensconced in a project with a particular client that has consumed my every waking thought, (and a few of my sleeping ones), but that has now drawn to a close.

I have now spent more time in the embrace of the NFP sector than I would have previously thought possible, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the commercial world where you can see benefits clearly expressed in numbers. These people who work in community services do amazing things, you know, and we should be thankful that they’re there. Certainly, during my experiences, I learned that they work tirelessly to help others, and that they often do so on a figurative shoestring.

Still, I’ve done something approximating my bit, and hopefully the people I worked with will find it a little easier in future to put forward their arguments about precisely why their projects and programs are deserving of precious funding dollars.

So now I look forward to finding my next opportunity to learn something. I look forward to my next chance to work with someone inspiring, and my next chance to find out something new and fascinating about how and what people do every day! If you think that person or project should be you, then you should let me know!

February 26, 2010 carts before horses

Someone asked me last week to find them a full time tender writer. They said that the volume of tenders they were putting together had gotten so high that they needed one. I spent some time talking with them and together we decided that what they needed was distinctly NOT a fulltime tender writer. What they needed was some attention paid to their processes, and the need to employ a fulltime staff member, with all of the associated on-costs and time spent, evaporated.

Here is part of the conversation we had.

a tendering process diagram

Tender Process

Before we engage in fundamental changes to the way that operational functions take place, it is important to understand what it is that we are attempting to accomplish. Tendering in the Australian marketplace is a fundamental component of winning government and NGO business. A “necessary evil”, the aim when designing a tendering process is to:

a)      Ensure visibility to major opportunities

b)      Streamline opportunity qualification

c)       Provide structure & guidance for planning sales message

d)      Create templates and library text for some information

e)      Ensure ownership of document and opportunity

f)       Identify additional resources that can be accessed

g)      Build pricing guidelines

h)      Create review process

i)        Identify and eliminate production bottlenecks

By attacking these macro issues, the broader question of the effectiveness of the tender process will tend to resolve itself. For example: Once the qualification mechanism is rock solid, the amount of tenders that sit outside core business drops. The downstream consequence of this drop is a considerable reduction in workload for operational tender staff – the number of tenders drops, but so does the complexity of those tenders.

Each point on the list has a similar effect. We can measure the success of these process changes as we move through the project; each will have a quantitative impact on the volume, complexity, success and quality of tenders.

By streamlining process, we are able to drive a larger wedge into the project timeframe to actually consider the business needs of the client. We can spend time thinking about the reasons for their project; the likely value adds that will appeal, and design a list of ideas or concepts to be “seeded” through the eventual document.

Once the initial program is undertaken, a professional tender writer can be engaged at significant points in the project timeline, rather than for its entirety. A consulting tender writer can then function as

a)      A “neutral” party to moderate qualification meetings

b)      A “translator” of tender documentation, particularly in contract terms

c)       A reviewer of assembled documentation

d)      A polisher of existing text, bringing it together with a single “voice”, and seeding with core themes

With this methodology, the client reaches the end of the first year of engagement with a considerably improved tender product, at reduced cost, and without the hire of any additional staff.

January 28, 2010 everything or nothing

It’s difficult, being a startup, to nail down precisely what it is that you do to add value to a client’s business.

When they call you, and we start the conversation, and they say to you “what can you do for us?” my immediate thought is “well, I’ll do whatever you want me to”.

But that’s not the right answer.

To add real value, to be a worthwhile asset, you need to be clear about your offering. You need to be able to tell them what they need. And you need to do it without coming off like a snake oil salesman.

I’ve been talking to a few people today who have asked me what the advantage to hiring a tender writer is. The answer is both simple and complicated. A tender writer removes the need to worry about the process. A good tender writer then delivers a document that’s as good or better than you could have written yourself, and they deliver it when they say they will. They manage the project so that there’s no huge surprises, in document delivery or specification or contract. They guide you to the end of the project and leave you feeling like you’ve submitted something of real value, something that will pique the client’s interest. They make sure you don’t have tender box remorse, that you don’t have too many sleepless nights, and they do that at a reasonable price.

What’s reasonable? Well, that all depends on how much you hate tendering, doesn’t it?

December 17, 2009 What is your major malfunction?

I’m paranoid about being late.

P-a-r-a-n-o-i-d.

I turn up to events early. I’m the first person through the door, when the host is still in the shower and the vacuum cleaner’s on the floor in the living room. I go to meetings and then sit in the foyer for 20 minutes. I have an in-depth and personal knowledge of the holding rooms at many large organisations. I get to Gioco before it opens, and then wait for Serge to arrive so I can have my coffee.

I’m early, is what I’m saying, perpetually early.

Before I had my problem in hand, I was very very difficult to travel with; airports are places of pretty high stress for me. One would not want to miss the plane.

However, or indeed perhaps because, I’m a tender writer. Tender writers need to be paranoid about being late. Tender writers need to have a giant red flashing countdown clock in the back of their brain that tells them how long until they need to start printing.

In this instance, then, I have been successful (whether by design or by accident can wait for another post) in turning my weakness into something I can use in a business context.

I know other people who are hopelessly addicted to reading (librarians), who have an aversion to mismatched colours (graphic designers) and folks who never quite got over playing with lego (mechanical engineers).

What’s your malfunction, and how do you use it for the benefit of you and your clients?

December 4, 2009 pre-flight checks

I’m starting to think about how, exactly, one goes about becoming “a business person”, as opposed to a person who does business. About what it is that we use to identify, to categorise and place into boxes, the people we work with.

In the new age, in the 21st century social media web 2.0 age, is the indicator of your seriousness about your profession still your address, or is it how many followers you have on twitter? What do we still care about in terms of providing the cachet of commercial confidence?

Business cards.

At their most basic, they are a physical method of passing your contact details to another person. In giving them you say “I found our conversation valuable, and I want to gain more information about you with a view to doing business”. In accepting them; “I thought you understood my needs and want to hear more about your ideas”.

But, if we’re being hip and groovy about it – do we need to use a piece of paper to do that?

I can learn far more about you by googling your name than by reading your business card, you can learn more about me.

Your company website will contain more details, mine holds examples of my work.

Your twitter feed will tell me what you thought after the meeting, mine will tell you how confident I am.

Your facebook will show me what your hobbies are, and if we have any friends in common, and where we went to school.

Does the profligacy of information in the data heavy world make business cards obsolete?

And what font should I use on mine?

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December 3, 2009 Pushed out of the nest

I’ve been working for other people for a long time. Long enough that I have a few grey hairs, and that I know I don’t like it very much.

I got made redundant three days ago, and I decided to make it an opportunity.

I don’t generally buy into the anthony robbins mentality of the people who want you to spend thousands of dollars on personal development tapes (you want to know if they’re useful? take a look at how many of them are on ebay), but I’m getting rather excited about seizing the day.

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