Writing Bid Proposals

So your weary team of proposal writers is getting near the end. Gaps are being filled, and the Requirements Table that you created at the start of the bid is getting more and more ticks/green dots every day. The submission date is looming and, as bid manager, you are looking forward to a break after proposal submission.

Now’s the moment when your best friend is a good editor (or editors). Her/his job is to make sure that you haven’t made a fool of yourself anywhere in the bid, that you haven’t shot yourselves in the foot in the technical detail, and that the final output looks and sounds mature, knowledgeable and professional.

An experienced proposal editor will be studying the final outputs on at least three levels:

• Approach and messages, including graphics
• Facts and figures, hard evidence, consistency
• Writing, grammar, punctuation and formatting

At the business capture stage your senior company team will have decided on a technical and commercial approach to the opportunity and will have agreed upon the messages that filter down from this approach. Customer hot buttons and win themes for the bid will have been established and should be up on the wall under the noses of authors as a daily reminder to incorporate them into inputs.

The editor’s first job then is to ensure that the approach and messages are very obviously there in the text and in graphics and that the evaluator walks away from reading your bid with no doubt about the messages and win themes that you want to convey.

Secondly, technical detail and evidence is the meat of your bid – it must be factually correct, consistent across volumes and crucially must provide proof of where your company has successfully applied these skills before. ‘Trust us, we can do this’ is not enough. The evaluator will be looking for examples of success in specific projects that have close similarities with the current opportunity. A thorough list of bid writing conventions will help achieve consistency, as will getting authors to talk to each other!

Thirdly, the editor will ensure that the writing is succinct, that repetitive waffle is eliminated, grammar is clear and correct, punctuation is perfect, typos are corrected and formatting blips are put right. It is absolutely essential that the bid looks and sounds professional – anything less suggests a sloppy attitude within your company.

Of course in an ideal world editors will be working with your team from the earliest days of the opportunity and will have been instrumental in issuing a writing brief and a list of bid writing conventions for authors – what to call your own team (Team X…), how to refer to the customer (the client, the customer, the Authority…), how to refer to subcontractors, and much more. If authors adhere to these conventions when creating their draft inputs, it will definitely save you a considerable amount of time and money in levels two and three of the editing process.

The bad news is these three levels of editing are difficult to do simultaneously and if they are, mistakes will inevitably be missed. Ideally they should be done sequentially by one editor, or if time and budget allows, in an editing loop by three editors or an editor and two assistants (perhaps experienced authors from the writing team).

What is fatal is to eliminate the editing process altogether, in the belief that ‘anybody can do editing’ and that a ‘quick look over’ is sufficient and will save on budget. An incorrect price in the commercial volume, technical inconsistencies between volumes, global changes to volumes that create gobbledegook, sloppy writing and waffle will be the result. I’ve seen many a bid manager, re-reading the in-house version after submission, cringe at the bloomers and inconsistencies that his team came up with.

Proposal losing errors. Failing errors.

It’s not necessary and as bid manager you won’t let it happen. A thorough editing loop is worth every penny.