How selling in writing is different than selling in person

Selling in writing is about influencing the decision process and the decision maker with what you put on paper. Procurements that require a proposal are not impulse purchases. When the customer will make their decision based on the proposal you submit, you need to sell in writing to influence the outcome in your favor. A salesperson has influence in person, but if they don’t carry that over to what gets put in writing they have no influence over closing the actual sale.

Influence in person vs influence in writing

To sell in writing, the salesperson must discover how to influence both the decision process and the decision maker when they are reading instead of talking in person. Then you must provide instructions to the proposal writers that explain what will achieve this influence. This is very different from influencing potential customers through charisma and personal sales technique. Winning in writing means the salesperson can't just "leave the writing to the experts" and stay out of the proposal effort. It also means they can't sell the same way they do in person.

The salesperson doesn't have to write the proposal or even choose the words, but they must inform the writers of the customer's decision process, preferences, and how to position those words for maximum influence. Who else would know how the customer makes buying decisions?

How persuasion in writing is different than in person

When you try to persuade someone in person, they often make their decision on the spot. When you have to persuade someone in writing, they take their time deliberating. They think more about how they should decide and what criteria should guide them. They try to be more logical. They compare, often line by line, in a way that can’t be done with the spoken word. Differentiators matter more than impressions when selling in writing.

When there are written evaluation criteria, the customer assesses and often completes forms. Sometimes proposals are not read by evaluators, they are scored instead. Imagine selling in person in a meeting where the customer staff present are assessing what you said against written criteria, giving what you say a score, and making their decision based on that. This makes selling in writing completely different.

Winning in writing requires influencing the decision process

The customer may have a formal process with an evaluation team to score the proposals they receive. If it’s a government proposal, then winning in writing is all about writing to optimize the scoring process. The salesperson's role becomes communicating how the customer implements their evaluation process, how to interpret the RFP, who is involved and how they make their decisions, and what needs to go into the proposal to achieve the maximum score. 

No matter how the customer tries to create an evaluation process that is objective and impersonal, they can't quite remove all of the subjectivity. Different evaluators will score the same thing, using the same evaluation criteria differently. When they read the proposal, they will look for different things because some things concern them differently than the other evaluators. Salespeople play a crucial role in discovering the concerns that the proposal evaluators have. These concerns often do not make it into the RFP. One crucial part of a good proposal win strategy is being able to articulate the customer's concerns and preferences in ways that proposal writers can translate into how to position the things they are writing about.

To win in writing, you must take how the customer will reach their decision into account, make sure they have the information they need to reach their decision, and if possible guide them through it. Before proposal writers can do that, you have to give them this information. You can't expect your proposal writers to know the customer well enough to know their current concerns and preferences related to this particular procurement. The information a salesperson seeks from the customer must anticipate what the writers will need to know to write the winning proposal. The salesperson’s success at closing the sale depends on it. When everyone has the same RFP, winning in writing requires achieving an information advantage before you start any actual writing. This changes the sales process and how it is conducted.

Salespeople are vital to the proposal process

The salesperson is the connection between the people at the customer and the proposal document. Watch a salesperson in action when interacting with a customer: they ask questions, make suggestions, and choose their approach based on the answers. You can’t do that in writing. If someone hasn't done that in person before the writing starts, you will write your proposal with all the charm of an ignorant stranger.

If a salesperson talks to the customer, but then doesn’t participate in planning what to say on paper, you lose any insight they may have had. You still end up proposing like a stranger. From the customer’s perspective, you set the relationship back because everything that was discussed is absent when they read the proposal. It makes your company look like it is all talk with no follow-through, which happens to be correct.

This makes having a salesperson's insights vital to the proposal process. However, it requires translating from in-person talk to persuasion through writing. If you depend on proposals to close the sale, you need a salesperson who speaks both languages. You need a salesperson who understands what goes into proposal writing and how to be a part of that process instead of being a random element or attempting to command it. You probably don't want the salesperson doing the writing, because then they are not selling. But you do want them to understand what good proposal writing is and how it more closely resembles cooking than creative writing. They are a vital part of the proposal team.

If your company depends on selling in writing, then your sales force better play a key role in that writing and not simply hand it off to someone else to produce — at least not if you want to be competitive.

Winning in writing requires more precision

Mistakes made in writing are permanent. Never mind typos. If you misinterpret the customer, misunderstand what they want, or fail to write from their perspective, they will be constantly reminded of it every time they look at your proposal. Your salesperson needs to vet what you intend to offer and what you think matters with the customer so that when you present it in the proposal you position it correctly. Proposing blind is gambling where the house has better odds than you do.

In a face-to-face meeting, trust is earned through body language, questions and answers, challenges and responses, and interaction. People decide to trust each other based on their responses and interactions. In writing, customers decide whether to trust a vendor based on how thoroughly the offering meets their needs, how accurate what they put in writing is, and how well what they see in writing demonstrates that the vendor listened to them. People only buy from people they trust. To win in writing you must prove you are trustworthy and not merely claim it.

If you are going to write your proposal from the customer’s perspective, you must be able to relate everything about your offering to what matters to the customer. It must reflect their preferences and fulfill their needs, goals, and desires. To achieve that, you need someone who can not only talk to the customer and discover those things, but who can anticipate what the writers will be trying to do later and get the input they need to be successful. You also need to get it right, with precision, and in writing. You need a quality-driven proposal process to achieve this reliably. Good people working hard is not enough to consistently deliver winning proposals.