How to win proposals by making them exciting and full of passion

If you write your proposal by simply following the RFP, you will not only create an uncompetitive proposal, you will create a proposal that is boring. It will be boring to the customer, boring to your reviewers, and boring to write. I have reviewed a lot of boring proposals.

Boring proposals are often a result of people overly focusing on RFP-compliance and not on being extraordinary.

Compliance is good. But not good enough to win. The key to winning is in how you turn compliant proposals into something that is exciting to review and exciting to write.

It helps when instead of simply following RFP instructions to describe things, you can focus on what matters about those things. The more a proposal matters, the less boring it is. The more it explains, guides, or inspires and the less it describes, the better.

The emotion that wins proposals

If you don't know what really matters to the customer, what their concerns, fears, interests, agenda, ambitions, goals, preferences, etc., are then in order to write an exciting proposal you have to write about the next best thing: passion.

If you don't want to bore yourself to tears writing a proposal, then starting by finding your passion. Passion for the subject. Passion for the outcome. Passion for the possible future. It's good to write about benefits. But if you want to write something compelling, first find your passion and then write about those benefits.

If you look at an RFP, and all you can think of to say is that you'll do what they asked for, then you're not being very passionate about it. But if you read the RFP and see ways to truly make a difference, problems that can be solved in ways that are better than anyone has imagined, or an approach to make the customer's dreams come true in reality, then you are tapping into something powerful, compelling, and that can lead to a proposal that's worth reading.

What is your company passionate about? What gets you excited about fulfilling the customer's needs? Tell them. Just explain it from the customer’s point of view so that it's about how it impacts them instead of being about you. What gets your company fired up? What breaks the routine and makes everyone suddenly motivated? Tap into that and write from the heart. Winning proposals are not routine. 

What about your work are you passionate about? What do you like about it? What is important about it? Put your cynicism aside for a moment and remember what it's like to believe you can change the world through your work. Then describe that much better world for the customer. Make your proposal about how you are going to deliver just that. Write about what the customer is going to get and why it passionately matters. Show your excitement for how wonderful it will be.

If you sit down in front of your keyboard and can't find the inspiration to say something extraordinary, maybe you shouldn't be bidding. If you don't find inspiration in your work, how are you going to delivery anything besides what's expected and ordinary? If you can't get excited about it, how can you possibly make the customer excited about selecting it?

How finding your passion wins proposals

You can try to win your proposal by being similar to but a little better than your competitors. Or you can get so fired up and show your love for achieving things that matter that it will wake your customer up from their boring job of evaluating proposal after proposal. Instead of doing what everyone else does a little better, write a proposal the customer can fall in love with.

In school you were taught to write like journalists — to be objective and unemotional. Business speak is intentionally bland, inauthentic, vague, passive, and unaccountable. If you are a technical specialist, then you were likely taught that engineering is not about emotion. You were taught wrong.

If you care about what you do, and you want to do a good job, and are pleased with the outcomes and you know the customer will be too, those are all emotional responses. And it’s good to show them in your proposal. You just have to go beyond business-speak in order to do it.

Turn your feelings into something that matters

However, while you want to show what you care about, you don't want to write about your feelings. Your feelings don't add any value to the customer. Don't write about your intent, your commitment, or your desires. Instead, show your feelings through how much the results the customer will get are going to matter. The more something matters or the more important it is, the more compelling it is, and the better the results should be. Talk about what approaches are better, why they are better, and how important the impact of that is. Turn your passion for what matters into how much better the results can be instead of telling the customer what you think or feel. 

Turn your proposal into something the customer can feel

What will the customer think or feel when they read your proposal? Will they find it boring or exciting? Is it the outcome routine or something they can look forward to? If you don't know what the customer will feel about what you said in your proposal, do you understand them as much as you think you do? How did you write the understanding section of the proposal if you don't know what they will look forward to?

You can’t tell them what they will or should think or feel without being patronizing. However, by describing the results, you let the customer experience their feelings naturally. 

If you don't feel inspired, how can you inspire the customer?

When you find your passion about what you are offering, you can inspire the customer about the possibilities. An exciting proposal is about unexpectedly wonderful improvements, the results, the aspirations that will become real. It will inspire them to feel great about your proposal without telling them what to feel.

If you have to pick a vendor, and one is passionate about what they do and the other is dry or formal, which is more likely to get the job? Do you want something important built by someone who is passionate about the engineering, or someone who is uninspired? If one proposal is about how important what the vendor does is and how much better it makes things for the customer, while the other proposal just describes what the customer will pay for, which will inspire more confidence in the customer?

But your passion has to be genuine. You can’t fake it. And it can’t be about you, what you’re going to get, what you want to do, or how good you feel about doing it. Your proposal should be about sharing how wonderful the results will be and your passion for the things that matter.

In each section of your proposal, think about the things that really matter and then focus on why they are worth feeling passionate about. Then show your passion for what matters by proving you're willing to go beyond the ordinary and deliver amazing results.