How do you ensure the same “voice” to each section of your submission, while allowing each section author to write in his or her own unique voice?
Contrary to logic, it’s not some kind of near-impossible balancing act. The answer is simple. The execution, however, isn’t.
The answer is to use a highly skilled, seasoned writer to conduct all editing . . . and to allow time for the substantial re-writing that will almost certainly be necessary in the context of high-value bids authored by multiple writers.
The norm, however, is that even organisations that employ or hire in a writer of the sufficient calibre to pull off what is usually a challenging editing brief, invariably allow insufficient before the submission deadline to achieve it.
The result is often an unhappy mosaic of different writing styles and a massive variation in the degree of substance comprising each answer/section within the overall submission.
The ideal solution, then, is obvious . . . Don’t just hire a talented writer/editor. Give them the time they need for the job. (And whatever you estimate that to be, double it. At least.)
But it’s not that simple. And the reason is three-fold:
- Insufficient time allowances are made earlier on in the production schedule for other key phases in the process – research and discovery, strategy development and documentation and, of course, the authoring of submission sections.
- There’s no formal, written strategy document. Or if there is, it’s too basic, not user-friendly, and isn’t distilled into a basic writing guide for each section’s author.
- Subject matter experts or other section authors who are not writers by profession lack the required writing skills produce a competent submission contribution. In short, it’s not their day job. And writing is almost certainly not their passion.
It’s A Battle I’ve Waged & Lost . . . Over and Over
Addressing issue (1) could see me slip into a small rant about how much more strategic and convincing a submission would be if (a) the entire response process started a little (or a lot) earlier in most cases, and (b) how it takes time to research, develop and document a compelling bid strategy . . . just as it does to produce competent, well-crafted written submission sections.
It’s a battle I’ve waged (and lost) with many a client and their bid managers. (And I, along with others, have paid the price in terms of a marathon of stressed-out activity over the course of a week or more leading up to tender closing date.)
Let’s address these issues one at a time:
Realistic Time Allocation is a Big Part of the Solution
It is quite the norm for “strategy development workshops” to feature ridiculously unrealistic time allocations like “45 minutes” to cover “competitive intelligence”. (See the Fireside Interview with Babette Bensoussan, Australia’s Queen of Competitive Intelligence.)
Let’s think about that.
If, for example, there is a field of five competitors, that’s nine minutes per competitor.
Nine minutes to drill deeply into all manner of elements, including but certainly not limited to:
- That company’s record and relationship with the client organisation – at both the organisational and the individual level.
- Strengths and weaknesses relevant to the client’s problem, project or contract, its commercial / operating / stakeholder environment, its challenges, needs, sensitivities, and much, much more.
- To identify what primary and secondary information already exists, cross-reference and fact-check it, determine what should still be collected, collect it, and then analyse all this individually and as a collective picture.
Nine minutes.
An hour is another common time allocation I’ve seen. With the same number of competitors – i.e. five – that would be 12 minutes per competitor.
And that’s taking a very narrow view of the competition, and assuming you know for certain what organisations the field of completion comprises.
It’s ludicrous.
Don’t Make A Joke of the Process
And that’s just one demonstration of the way in which one central component of bid strategy formulation is compressed into a timeframe that’s little short of a joke.
This whole scenario is one of the primary contributors to issue (2) i.e. no formal, written strategy document to encapsulate the basis and guiding themes of the proposition or proposed solution.
Usually, this type of “guidance” is limited to flip sheets pinned up around the room into which section writers are mustered. At best, there’s some form of skeletal, bullet-point, raw capture of notes with “strategy” appearing euphemistically in its title. Yet, to whatever degree bid planning workshops may have produced a clear and comprehensive strategy, it’s likely quite a few of the contributing writers weren’t even present.
They need more. Much more.
It’s Time to Get Real About Writing Skills
On to issue (3) . . .
Writing is a skill. And bid writing is a highly specific skill within the overall skill writing set.
It’s unrealistic to throw someone who’s an engineer or an IT business developer, for example, at the task of composing substantial or important sections of a commercial proposal – and to expect that shaping the output (which includes making sense of and/or going back to that contributor for missing information) into something accurate, comprehensive and compelling in two or three draft exchanges with an editor.
But, in general, that is the expectation. And therein lies the root of this enduring and not insignificant problem.
