Writing the Perfect Business Pitch | BTalk Australia

(22min 05) How do you write a pitch that will win the business? On today’s BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Robyn Haydon, the author of “The Shredder Test — the Australian Guide to Writing Winning Proposals”.

You’ll find the answers to common questions like:

• who should write it?
• how long should it be?
• what if you don’t meet all the bid criteria?

Make sure you listen before you next start tapping out a proposal for new business.

Add your comments in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

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• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia. And today how do you stop your business proposals finding themselves in the paper shredder?

Writing the perfect pitch. How do you put together a proposal document that will actually be read and hopefully will win you the business? Well, Robyn Haydon is the author of “The Shredder Test — The Australian Guide to Writing Winning Proposals”. Now, Robyn presumably that’s where a lot of proposals find themselves; shredded and taken home and, perhaps, used as bedding material for the pet guinea pig. I guess that’s the reason for the title for the book is it?

Robyn Haydon: Exactly when I first had the idea of writing the book that was the first thing that came to me and when people are sitting in their office with their soft music on and trying to sing to themselves and pouring their heart and soul into writing a proposal I think the last thing that they think of is the fact that it may end up there. And in actual fact that’s where the majority of proposals do end up. And especially now, I do a lot of work in competitive tendering and probably, I think, things out there are about three times as competitive as they were this time last year, so that means that people who are buying stuff have three times as many proposals to read. And so, yes, the logical outcome of that, of course, is that a lot of them end up on the reject pile.

Dobbie: And there’s a big imbalance which in the amount of time spent writing these things and the amount of time spent consuming them as well, of course, which you’ve got to be painfully aware of, I think.

Haydon: Yes, absolutely, I mean a proposal that takes you a week to write might take a couple of minutes for somebody to flip their eye over, and if you can’t grab them in the executive summary, which is extremely important, and a lot of proposals lack a really concise commercially-focused executive summary. If you can’t grab them there and even in the first couple of paragraphs it’s like when you go into a book store and you’re rifling through the shelves and you’re trying to find something that appeals to you. You really only have a very short window of opportunity to get a potential purchaser’s attention. So it is really just like rifling through a stack of books and picking out the two or three that you might want to read in detail.

Dobbie: So, I guess it really depends on what it is you’re bidding for but the exec’s summary, what a couple of pages with a lot of the financial details or is that less important should it be more how you’re going to deliver what you’re being asked to deliver?

Haydon: I would say with an executive summary one of the common problems that I see is that executive summaries really aren’t summaries at all, they’re just a synopsis of the technical aspects of the proposal. If you think about who’s reading an executive summary, they’re called an executive summary for a reason, it’s usually the most senior decision maker will read that part of your proposal, they might not read anything else. So I always say to people one to three pages is plenty never go over three no matter how long your actual proposal is, and some proposals can be very long. As far as the financial details are concerned this is the place to spell out exactly why a purchaser needs to choose you and putting in the financial benefits of your offer we can save you 25 percent over the life of this contract by doing this, this and this; this is absolutely the place to spell out all of that so that they will go, oh, OK, I need to read this in more detail.

Dobbie: Now, should you assume that different people are going to read different parts of the proposal and does that mean that the style of the proposal can change as you move from section to section assuming that you’re going to have subject matter experts consuming those relevant parts?

Haydon: Yes, that’s very true and, in fact, a lot of people don’t realise that either that there is going to be more than one person reading your proposal and that they are going to have different interests. In my book there’s a whole chapter devoted to how to keep evaluators’ hot buttons and that’s thinking about all of the people who might potentially be reading your proposal and what their role is. For example, we tend to think maybe there’s just one person that we’ve been speaking to so that’s the only person who’s going to be reading the proposal but it won’t be, there’ll be the person who signs the cheques, there might be the user you’ve been talking to. If you’re selling, let’s say, for example, software that has a specific technical purpose, for example, payroll software, the IT people will look at it and the HR people will look at it, so there are a whole bunch of people as well as the pertinent people and others who will be going through your proposal. I wouldn’t necessarily say that sections of the proposal need to be written in different language, but they need to be written with the concerns of the reader in mind. The only time I usually recommend using a different style of language is in the executive summary because that really needs to be like one senior decision maker talking to another senior decision maker whereas the rest of the proposal can be more, I guess, more technically oriented in nature, although, of course, it still has to be able to be easy to understand.

Dobbie: So does that mean you should have one person who writes the whole thing. I mean you might get subject matter experts to contribute but is it important to have one person who ensures there’s some continuity through the document? I’ve seen lots of large documents that have been thrown together and it looks just like that, that they’ve been thrown together and a whole lot of people have written their sections without reading the whole document themselves.

Haydon: Absolutely, in fact, before I started talking to you today I was putting together a persuasive writing workshop for a client of mine in the IT industry and they’re a consulting organisation, and this is one of the problems that they have. There are a number of people who contribute to proposals and those people are often complaining that their input gets changed but that’s because they don’t have a really clear idea of how it should be written in the first place. If you don’t have the luxury of having a bid manager like me who can come in and take all of those desperate pieces of content and actually write them as one voice your best option is to get all of your technical people to write content in a way that it doesn’t really need a lot of editing by the time it gets to you. So, yes, you’re spot on there. It’s a big problem.

Dobbie: But that can actually be, you know, if everyone does it in a way that it doesn’t need editing that to me sounds like it could also be incredibly dull. And I guess that’s another question isn’t it. Is there a way of making your proposal more interesting? Because it is primarily a sales document, of course, and can it be too flashy? Can you be too overt in the techniques you use? And conversely, can it also be too dull? How do you get the right balance?

Haydon: Well, that’s a very good question and the simplest way to answer that and the way that I describe it to my clients is that you apply the steak knife test. And I call it that because if you read back something to yourself and it sounds like you’re trying to flog steak knives then you’ve gone too far. And a lot of people who’ve had marketing backgrounds and PR backgrounds tend to be a little bit guilty of this because they talk in headlines and they talk in brochure speak and it’s just not appropriate for a proposal.

The steak knife test aside, probably the simplest way for people to actually edit their own proposals is to read it aloud and see whether it sounds like something you would actually say to a buyer, because if it doesn’t then you’re either being too technical and too confusing and as you said things can come out sounding a bit flat. You remember you’re trying to sell something so you want to get them interested and you want to move the conversation along. But, and this is probably the third thing I’m trying to say in answer to a single question here but there’s more than one question in that question, I think, and that is that a lot of proposals tend to lack the two or three key messages that are going to make a buyer choose you. If you think about it from their perspective they’re sitting there waiting for a lot of stuff. Not only do you have to keep their interest but when they get to the end they need to be able to say, well, we should choose Phil’s company because of this, this and this, and those things should be very, very easy for them to recall once they finish reading your proposal. And I call those Purchase of Value Topics, some people call them win things and there are processes to actually develop those and make sure that you use them in a proposal. But it’s about finding a balance between selling the key benefits of your offer and actually writing in language that a lay person on the other end of this who hasn’t met you or who doesn’t know your product offer the way that you do in a way that they can understand.

Dobbie: So, those two or three key messages should you keep on going back to them throughout the document if you’ve got a lengthy document? Should you be saying, well, we need to make sure we reinforce this message every five or six pages, for example?

Haydon: Yes, a short answer is yes, we should definitely make sure that it’s in more than one place in the document. But the way to do that is to look at where is the most appropriate place to include that information. And when I’m producing a bid I produce a story board at the beginning of that bid where we look at all of the things that we’re being asked to answer by the purchaser and we say, OK, now we’ve got our purchase of value topics here’s a question about quality, here’s a question about solution if it’s IT or the statement of requirements if it’s a consulting assignment, that sort of thing. How can we actually weave those messages in so that we’re answering the question, sure, cause that’s essential, but we’re getting our message across as well.

Dobbie: I’ve got a couple of questions about meeting those, the criteria that you’re given. I mean, first of all, what happens if you take nine out of 10 boxes but there’s one criteria that you really don’t meet I mean, what should you do? Should you just fudge your way through or should you just be totally honest and say, hey, nine out of 10 is not bad?

Haydon: It depends on how hardball you want to go and how hardball the purchaser is going to be when they evaluate you. I mean we all saw what happened to Telstra in the National Broadband Tender, they were kicked out because they didn’t actually comply with the tendering conditions, they didn’t supply information about how they met, I think it was small and medium enterprise content.

Dobbie: Well, I think it was only four or five pages long as well and I think Optus was about 150,000 pages or something like that, so it was a fairly slim document.

Haydon: Look, I mean they probably looked at that and said, look, you know, these guys aren’t really serious about this I’m guessing that’s the message that that sent to the evaluators, and so, therefore, they could get them on a technicality. I think, what I always say to my clients anyway is compliance is the number one thing. We need to make sure we check all of the boxes first and if we don’t, if we can’t comply we need to be able to say what the alternative is. I mean I’ve had clients who have not complied to certain conditions and then gone on and won contracts. So it’s a more complex discussion and it’s a more individual discussion probably than what we’re able to have in a general talk about what works and what doesn’t work in a proposal. But I suppose a short answer is that, yes, it’s certainly possible to be successful if you don’t comply with everything the purchaser has asked for, but you need to be respectful of the fact that they had asked for that and really check with them initially unless you decide that it’s something that you will provide post tender. Check with them to see whether or not you actually will still be in contention.

Dobbie: A related point to that is: what happens if what they’re asking for you believe is not the best thing for them? Should you tell them that you think you’ve got a better solution and you know best or should you just address what they’re asking for?

Haydon: Yes

Dobbie: Just what they’re asking for.

Haydon: Yes to both. Because by the time, I mean if we’re talking tenders here, by the time you get to the tender that’s the end of the purchasing process. They’ve already decided what it is that they want to buy and in a lot of cases it’s quite difficult to talk a purchaser out of buying something that the organisation have committed to buying because they’ve gone through that whole process. However, if you do come in at the last minute and you do have something that’s much better then, of course, you need to tell them about it. You just want to be careful that you don’t knock yourself out of contention by saying, look, yes, we can do what you’d asked us to do, of course we can do that but we actually think this will work better. Because in my experience purchasers don’t always know exactly what it is that they need and it’s the organisation who’s pitching for the business; this is your area of expertise, you’re the ones who know the problems and the opportunities that are there. So it is important to spell it out because often times, and this has happened to clients of mine in the past, that will actually prompt a discussion about the way that this thing should be purchased and I had a client last year that won a fairly significant slice of business with a telecommunications provider simply because they said we do things this way we know you do things that way but we think our way is the way of the future and we explained to them why and that’s how they actually got their foot in the door with that contract because they did take that approach. But, of course, they had to be able to do the bare minimum of what was already being done.

Dobbie: So it’s like we can do this but we think this way is better?

Haydon: Yes, yes, that’s right.

Dobbie: Now, truth is, it can be a little illusive in some of these documents. It’s a bit like your CV isn’t it? I’m not saying that you’d ever do this but people do exaggerate a little bit on their CV’s and I think tender documents might be the same as well. But these are legal documents aren’t they, so I guess you’ve got to be —

Haydon: They are legal documents.

Dobbie: — so you’ve got to be careful about what you say.

Haydon: I would strongly argue that although it might be permissible it might — well, I don’t know if it’s permissible but it’s certainly practice that people stretch the truth on their CV. You should never stretch the truth in a proposal because it could come back to bite you in a really big way because a proposal is a legally binding document and it sets out the parameters of your agreement with the purchaser. So if you say you can do all of these things and you actually can’t then not only could you lose the business but potentially you could be in a lot of trouble. So part of my job when I work on bids is to actually act as the police person of some of these things because people will say, oh, we can do this, this and this and I’ll ask them to explain why and how they do it and I’ll find out that in actual fact that’s not strictly speaking the truth. So my job to remind the people that I’m working with that in actual fact they will be bound by that so let’s be honest about what we can do and let’s win the business on the merits of what we can do.

Dobbie: And it’s often the sales team that are putting these documents together and the sales team like to say, yes, of course, we can do that. They’re programmed in their brains to say that. So does that mean that the sales person is not necessarily the best person to be writing these documents?

Haydon: The best person to be writing a bid document or a proposal is actually not a person at all it’s a team of people. And I always say that there are three types of expertise you need to be successful when you’re writing your bid. You need commercial expertise or somebody who knows what you as a company want to achieve and what pricing, what commercial considerations you need to have in place to achieve that, someone who knows the customer and that’s often but not always a sales person. And thirdly you need a technical person, so somebody who knows the details of what you can do technically and how to configure that to meet a customer’s requirements. And you find that the commercial people on a bid team and the technical people on a bid team tend to balance out the natural tendency of the sales person to over exaggerate. So that actually works really well.

Dobbie: And who should be choosing what you go for? Because I guess there’s also, particularly in times like this, where the companies are finding it hard to survive there’s going to be a temptation isn’t there to chase after every lead that exists.

Haydon: Yes there is and I started to work with a company earlier this year who of the bid that I actually helped them work on just as an example bid because we were transferring some processes and techniques was a bid that they wouldn’t have even looked at 12 months ago because they really needed the work. And I think that really is the commercial reality at the moment. I mean in a lot of industries you’ll have smaller competitors who might be cheaper and quicker to market, then you’ll have bigger competitors who wouldn’t have considered the kind of jobs that you might have been going after 12 months ago that now almost certainly will. And my recommendation to my clients is that they do have a decision to bid process in place and that they do run through a list of at least 10 questions before they decide to invest time and energy into a proposal because I’ve actually had a situation last year with a company who were in an industry where they were providing services to councils, they actually decided to pull out of the bid halfway through because they realised it was too big for them. But by that point they’d already put time and energy into it themselves, they paid me, I’d done some work for them, so it was all a bit of a wasted effort really. And especially now even though there are more competitors and there are less opportunities out there you still need to be really, really stick about your chances of winning because it’s all time and energy and money at the end of the day.

Dobbie: That’s right and increased competition I mean that’s the thing everyone’s in the same boat, so if you’re going out wildly speculating I guess everyone else is going to be doing the same so you’ll find yourself in an even stronger competition.

Haydon: Well, in a couple of cases I’ve actually heard recently a client in the marketing industry they were bidding for a panel slot, I think, for government and the panel coordinator said, look we haven’t gotten back to you because we’re expecting 16 bids and we’ve got 50. So that’s just one example I heard of a similar example in another industry recently so that’s happening more and more.

Dobbie: Now, what’s the easiest way to fail in a tender? What’s the most common mistake? I mean we’ve already talked about Telstra. I think they wanted to fail, by the way.

Haydon: I think they did too by the looks of it.

Dobbie: But if you didn’t want to fail what are the most common mistakes. Just one or two things that you really should avoid doing and that most people who fail are guilty of?

Haydon: One of the things that I do for my clients is I go through past bids that haven’t been successful and I tell them why they haven’t been successful. And I would say that in every single bid that doesn’t make the short list and it doesn’t get considered there is a lack of customisation to what it is the client has asked for or the concerns that are on their minds particularly. This is common in industries where people write lots and lots and lots of bids, they get lots of material that they think they can reuse and they say, oh, here’s a question about quality or here’s a question about our such and such product and they don’t even read the question they just slap in their generic stuff and package it all together and send it off. And if you’re a client and you’re reading that it’ll take you half a second to figure out that that’s what it is that it is just boiler plate and that it has no relevance to you and you’re not going to look at it any further. Probably, although that’s not necessarily the most critical mistake in terms of winning business it’s the most fundamental mistake in terms of standing to be short listed. Because of you think about it out of your 50 proposals that you’re getting and the two or three that you’re going to read in detail, you’ve got to have a way of knocking people out and that’s the easiest way to do it is to just look at it and go, well, they haven’t really thought about what we’ve asked for and we’re just going to put it aside.

Dobbie: And keeping the last bid’s name, the last client’s name in the bid that’s a sure fire way as well. I think that happens sometimes.

Haydon: It’s a sure fire way and I have seen that. Actually I had a, this is going back a few years ago now, but I had a client who had done that and the find and replace function in Word is fantastic but not when it’s used indiscriminately. And in this particular case the prospect’s name was an acronym and it also formed parts of other words so it made a very entertaining reading, but needless to say they didn’t win that bid.

Dobbie: Strangely enough. Alright, Robyn, the book is called “The Shredder Test — The Australian Guide to Writing Winning Proposals”. We could talk all day about this it is one of those topics that you can talk at length about and I think we have actually. But thanks for your time today Robyn.

Haydon: You’re welcome.