3 Best Practices: Proposal Management Writing Collaboration
12.07.2021
-5 min
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Kris Sæther
12.07.2021
-5 min
Proposal writing is a team sport, tasking experts from across your organization to collaborate and bring a compelling and persuasive capture strategy to life in the proposal.
Together, their knowledge and experience is greater than the sum of their parts. Together, their writing establishes authority, demonstrates empathy, validates proficiency, and exhibits commitment. All things an evaluator hopes to find when reading and scoring your proposal.
Writing as a proposal team, however, presents a challenge; with more minds comes differing writing styles and conflicting information. If not diligently monitored and addressed, these issues can negatively impact your proposal win probability.
In the second of this four-part blog series, we will explore proposal management best practices with a focus on team interplay, or collaborative proposal writing.
Proposal writing can often feel like a race to the finish line. The majority of the team has a full-time job and everyone has conflicting deadlines and shifting priorities. Whether you decide to write a section together all in a single document or you decide to break down the section into different files, the goal is to get everyone on the same page so your proposal reads like it was written from a single, authoritative source.
Challenge: There are a lot of things to consider before writing a proposal section. What are the prospective client’s pains and goals? How does your solution solve their problem and achieve their vision for the future? What proofs do you have that you can do the work?
When your team is out of sync on these opportunity details, discriminators and win themes, hairline cracks begin to appear in the writing. Under pressure and deadline, these hairline cracks grow, creating glaring gaps in your narrative, making it difficult for evaluators to read and understand.
Best Practice: To bring greater accuracy and continuity to the narrative, gather and discuss the capture strategy, proposal outline and scoring criteria for the section. Ask questions and agree on overall proposition, style, voice, word choice, and quantitative supporting details.
Break down the high-level scoring categories into relevant questions that might be raised in the evaluator’s mind as they read. Answer each relevant question as part of the writing, breaking down the answers into simple steps and terms. And agree on the writing strategy.
Organizations rely on collaborative teams to ensure their proposals are correct, compliant, persuasive, and quickly compiled. Beginning with a pre-writing plan ensures everyone on the team is on the same page, delivering against capture strategy, and focusing reviews and revisions on improvement rather than correction.
No one wants to start from a blank page, or spend time recreating the wheel. Existing, or reusable, content, either from a content library or a past proposal, can speed things up. It can help the team turn around a quick first draft or submit on a tight deadline.
Challenge: We’ve written this before. Can’t we just use that? Yes, but, there are dangers; when your proposal narrative feels “cobbled” together from different sources, evaluators begin to question your attention to detail. And when your proposal doesn’t speak to their specific needs, evaluators begin to question your real interest in their business.
Best Practice: So, leverage your previous content to build your first draft and identify your gaps. Then use these best practices to fill the gaps and tailor your content with a focus on context unique to the customer, and of course, the evaluator.
It may take many drafts to achieve the level of proposal maturity and quality evaluators crave for the win. Tailoring your content will erase the taint of reusable content, and help evaluators better understand, and accept, your solution.
As the team writes, proposal reviews are a critical step in the process. It is here where reviewer reactions and insights advance proposal maturity and quality; where a choppy narrative becomes engaging, where more concise language builds credibility, and where added details drive a deeper understanding of the solution for a more lasting impression.
Challenge: Aren’t we done yet?
Best Practice: Revisions are typically a crossroads for the proposal team. Time is of the essence, and the course of action chosen will significantly affect the proposal’s win probability. Experience demonstrates that the more collaborative this Improvement phase, the more productive the revisions.
By harnessing the collaborative energy of your experts and writers during the writing or interplay phase, teams avoid the pitfalls of differing writing styles and conflicting information, and pave the way for faster, more productive reviews.
Kris Sæther
Kris Sæther is Chief Commercial Officer of Xait. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Graphic Media Studies, and has worked in financial communication in London and Frankfurt prior to joining Xait. He has 20+ years experience from the information management industry. Kris is an avid runner and skier, and a passionate fan of the world’s coolest soccer team, Tottenham. If he is not working or running you will find him cheering for his two daughters on the handball court.