Why winning in writing is more like cooking than speaking

Some people talk a good game, are full of charisma, and can be very persuasive. But their proposal win rates are often ordinary because they think all they need to do is sit down at a keyboard and hook the customer with the same pitch they'd use in person. Unfortunately. winning in writing has nothing to do with talking a good game. The problem isn't the pitch. The problem is that people process written words differently than they do spoken words.

While a conversational style in proposal writing is a good thing, there are so many ingredients that have be prepared in just the right way that winning in writing ends up more closely resembling cooking than speaking. You have to have quality ingredients, in the right proposals, and prepared to bring out their full potential. When everything rides on the customer preferring what you have to offer, you want the meal prepared by a chef and not something processed.

Winning in writing is not about talking the customer into taking what you’ve got. Winning in writing is about the customer making a selection from among other alternatives using an evaluation process. To select you, they need to:

• Have their expectations met
• See the things they need in your proposal
• Understand the value you are offering
• See what makes you different and accept those things as advantages
• Make favorable comparisons to their other alternatives
• Be confident that all of their requirements will be fulfilled
• Have everything they need to fulfill their procurement policies and procedures
• Believe they can trust you
• Convince others that it’s the right choice
• Accept your terms and conditions
• Be able to afford what you’ve proposed

And they need to see it all in writing.

That’s a lot of ingredients to keep organized in your head and get onto paper in the right order and in the right context. Winning in writing is a combination of fulfilling their expectations, satisfying their evaluation process, and giving them the best alternative. So you have to prepare the ingredients correctly. For winning in writing, this preparation generally involves:

• Research and intelligence gathering, to develop an information advantage
• Assessment, or figuring out what to do with what you've learned
• Offering design, to show up with the offering they want more than their other alternatives
• Strategy, to position everything both good and bad in ways that are advantageous to getting selected
• Assembly, or getting the right things into the document in the right order
• Communication, which for a proposal is a combination of articulation and graphics design

You can’t just sit down and write or talk your way out of it. That’s why proposal writing doesn’t just need a process. It is a process. If your process involves someone figuring it all out in a single step while typing a narrative response, then it’s a bad process. But it’s still a process.

This is also why you can't AI your way out of preparing proposals, or even a draft. At least not if you want to win. Take a look at the list of bullets above. An AI won't be able to balance those considerations, even if you tell the AI to consider them! There are plenty of ways to use AI that can help with proposal development. But creating a draft for you isn't one of them. That's a strategy based on performing infinite revisions until you run out of time instead of a strategy based on winning. You won't see a chef rushing to get the ingredients cooked so they can try this spice and that spice, tasting it with every addition, until they finally get it to test right.

A better process would collect the ingredients, assess them, and prepare a plan for what needs to be written, so that when you sit down to write it’s already mapped out for you. But a lot of people see writing as difficult, and don’t want to stray out of their comfort zone. For most of them, their comfort zone involves trying to write it like an essay in school, usually at the last minute and with little or no planning.

If you try that on a proposal you will leave ingredients out. And the ones that you include will not be prepared properly. And you won’t be able to fix it because you can’t un-cook something. 

The kind of proposal you get without planning is like a soup made with whatever random ingredients the cook had available. Even if the soup is tasty, if the customer doesn't want soup the customer will not be pleased. To win, you need to deliver the meal the customer wants, and impress them with how well prepared it is. To do that you have to not only take the order, but understand their preferences, have the ingredients, and figure out how to best prepare them to meet their expectations.

To do this in writing, you have to break it down into steps:

• Understand the customer's preferences
• Gather everything that will need to be written about and how
• Assess what you know and what you want to offer
• Determine what your bid strategies and positioning should be
• Prepare a plan for how to combine your ingredients into a winning proposal
• Validate that you’ve accounted for everything and have the right plan

And then you can start cooking. I mean writing. Skip any one of these items before you start writing, and the quality of your proposal will suffer. You can't just talk your way through winning in writing. You can't figure it out through conversation. You can't charm your way to winning in writing.