What is the most important skill for cultivating great proposal writing?

Great proposal writing isn't based on slick words. Great proposal writing does not require the editing skills of a professional. You really don’t have to be an expert in anything to be a great proposal writer. But there is one thing that is absolutely necessary, and not everyone has it. I’m not even sure that everyone can develop it. That thing is perspective. 

To write a great proposal, you must be able to conceive which words to use from the customer’s perspective. You must be able to think like the customer, read like the customer, and care about what the customer cares about. Proposal writing requires articulating what the customer needs to hear in order to reach a decision in your favor. But before you look at these things the ways the customer does, you must be able to consider perspectives beyond your own. You must be able to see things from the customer's perspective. If you want to improve your proposal writing skills, start by improving your ability to see the customer's perspective when they receive and evaluate a proposal.

Looking through someone else's eyes

Perspective is a skill that must be developed. Everyone thinks they have perspective, but my experience working with hundreds (thousands?) of proposal contributors has shown me that not everyone does. Some people are only capable of thinking, let alone writing, from their own perspective.

This affects not only the way we see things, but how we describe them. If the only perspective someone has is their own, then they interact with the world based solely on their own way of looking at things. When they write, they describe themselves instead of describing the things that matter to the customer. When they propose an offering, they write about what they are providing or will do instead of how it relates to why the customer is trying to procure it. When they consider proposal quality, they do it based on whether they think the proposal is presented the way they think it should be, instead of how the customer will see it. If the proposal says all the good things about them that it should, they think it’s a good proposal. Only they are not the customer and only the customer's opinion matters. They come up blank when you inform them that a good proposal should present what the customer needs to see instead of what they want to say.

Because they lack the customer’s perspective, they see getting selected as being completely about them. From that one perspective, how else could it be? The result is that their goal is to be as descriptive as possible and full of details about themselves. They want the customer to know how great they are. So that's what they tell them. From their customer's perspective, however, they just talk about themselves a lot.

A proposal that is instead written from the customer's perspective will show considerably more value to the customer than a monologue about how great you are. Only being able to look at the world through your own eyes is a competitive disadvantage. If your proposal is about you, your offering, your approaches, your commitment, your intent to be wonderful, and why the customer should select you, it will be vulnerable to a proposal that is written about what the customer will get, how it will improve things for them, why what you are proposing and your qualifications matter to them, and how it will fulfill their goals. If you can't make that shift, you've got a perspective problem that will keep you from writing great proposals.

A proposal may be full of good details, but the proposal won’t be great if it's about you instead of being about what the customer is looking for. Someone else proposing the exact same thing will evaluate much higher by describing it from the customer’s perspective instead of their own. This is because when you write from the customer’s perspective, you demonstrate that what you are proposing aligns with what matters to the customer and will fulfill their goals. Skilled proposal writing requires articulating things from the customer's perspective because it ensures that you provide the information they need to reach a decision in your favor and present it in a way that matters to them. Being really good at describing yourself and talking about yourself in impressive detail will not make you a better proposal writer.

How do you write from the customer's perspective?

Improving your proposal writing skills starts with doing a little bit of research to understand what matters to the customer. You have to know enough about them to be able to articulate things from their perspective. But that research alone is not enough. You have to consider things from the customer’s perspective and then write what they need to read to see, as opposed to what you think you should say. This is the skill you need to develop and continuously improve.

Perspective is an interesting thing. To grow beyond your own perspective and cultivate it as a skill, you have to learn to see things through other people’s eyes. Perspective requires a great deal of empathy. If you can’t imagine what someone else thinks or feels, or if it never occurs to you, then you need to work on your ability to do that effectively if you want to improve your proposal writing skills.

How to tell when you are NOT writing from the customer's perspective

Here are four warning signs that your proposal writing lacks perspective and is about yourself instead of being about the customer:

1. Everything starts with “we,” “our,” or your company name. 
2. Your company or team is the subject of every sentence. Your proposal is about your approaches, what you do, what you sell, the benefits you bring, and why you should be selected.
3. The text of the proposal is all about you describing yourself, your qualifications, your experience, and your strengths.
4. Your proposal is about you and how what you offer is great, instead of being about what the customer will get and how it will fulfill their goals.

A great proposal is about the customer and what they get out of everything you do or every qualification you have. You, your offering, and your qualifications only matter if they matter to the customer. The goal of shifting perspective is to be able to articulate your proposal in the ways that matter to the customer. When the customer sits down to read a proposal, they are looking for what they might get out of you, your offering, and your qualifications. You need perspective to be able to articulate in writing what the customer is looking for instead of merely saying how great you are.

To cultivate perspective as a skill, you need to think about what would matter to you if you were the customer, reading and evaluating a proposal. You need to understand the customer’s environment, pressures, goals, and aspirations. You need to learn to want the same things they want. You need to think through making a decision the same way that they will.

Then you write what they need to hear in order to decide in your favor. Your style of proposal writing, techniques, formatting, capabilities, and experience all matter very little compared to that. Style does not win proposals. Perspective does.

It takes a wide range of perspective to do this well

The customer is more than one person. The customer has more than one opinion, agenda, or set of goals. If it's an important procurement, there always is more than one person involved in reaching a decision. You not only need to write from the perspective of the decision maker, but you also need to be able to write to the perspective of everyone who influences the decision. In practice, this means considering all the points of view that might exist within the customer's organization and satisfying all of them that your proposal represents their organization's best alternative.

Anyone can do it. Except those who can't.

Someone with minimal experience and little knowledge but a solid grasp of the potential perspectives of the various readers can write better proposals than highly experienced proposal specialists who lack perspective. Proposal writing skills do not correlate with experience. Some people show up being able to do this naturally. However, even some highly experienced proposal writers write self-descriptive, accurate, but hopelessly ordinary proposals. Experience as a proposal writer matters far less than someone's ability to see the customer's perspective and write a proposal based on it. 

If you cultivate perspective at an organizational level, it becomes a competitive advantage for your company. This is another reason why effective proposal content planning has such a huge impact on your win probability. The proposal process shouldn't be primarily about steps, procedures, and production. The proposal process should be about how to consistently build every proposal around the customer's perspective. 

While some research is required, perspective mostly requires empathy. Since we all share the same basic human nature, we all have similar concerns and motivations. This includes the people also known as "the customer." Twisting wording around in our heads to look at them from the outside in requires a lot of effort. And a little skill.

It comes easier to some people than it does to others. In my experience, most of the people who struggle to find the words to write in a proposal are really struggling with perspective and not with proposal writing. The challenge is not putting words on paper, it's putting words on paper from someone else's perspective.

If you have spent your life only looking through your own eyes, you may not be able to twist your mind around enough to write from someone else’s perspective. It’s easy to think about what’s important to you. It’s a lot harder to think about what’s important to someone else who has different concerns, values, knowledge, experience and priorities.

The more you imagine what someone with different concerns, values, knowledge, experience, and priorities cares about, the better you will get at being able to articulate their perspective. The better you get at it, the easier it will be to write from someone else’s perspective. And the better you get at doing that, the better you will be at writing great proposals.

Writing good proposals vs. writing great proposals

You can write better proposals by learning more about what should go into them. But if you really want to write great proposals, just learn to channel the customer, do a little research, meditate on the Zen of proposal perspective, or simply ponder what it’s like to be the customer conducting a procurement and trying to get your needs met. Then don't try to be a great writer. Just try to write from the customer’s perspective instead of your own and the customer will think you've written a great proposal. And their opinion is the only one that matters.