Compelling Copy in Four Easy Steps

Do you feel that your bids read well? Do you worry that your ideas don’t come across on paper? Are you losing out on quality scores and having to lower your prices as a result? 

Having the right copy to hand is a great feeling. Just for a moment, the pressure is off as you’ve found the right, perfect response to the question you’re trying to answer. Or, at least, the bones of it, sufficient that it’s easy to fill in the blanks. There's a more important issue here though. Time spent fixing bad copy is time not spent writing the new, bespoke elements that will really resonate with your client and make their decision to award the win to you that much easier.

In my previous article, I wrote about structuring your library in a way that it makes information easy to find. In this article, I will focus on the task of obtaining, structuring and producing the content itself. 

Get the Best from your SMEs

Bids touch every part of an organisation. Getting the best, up to date, most exciting content from your subject matter experts (SMEs) is vital. How do you go about that?

An SME doesn’t work in sales or bidding. Helping out on a bid might be something that they’ve been asked to do, but it’s not the reason they entered into their particular professional specialism and it’s probably not something that they enjoy. So, you need to make it easy for them. That means:

• Giving them guidance and a structure to follow (a list of the sort of information you’re looking for, storyboards or answer plans, worked examples, ...)
• Being clear and organised, using their time wisely and at a point convenient to them
• Not bombarding them with requests for the same information time and again

Most people, faced with someone who has clearly been considerate in their approach and planning, will reciprocate and get you the information that you need. At the very least, given a structured and timely approach on your part, they have little justification for not cooperating with your requests, which should be sufficient for you raise the issue with more senior managers who are better able to judge the relative priorities of one activity over another.

Writing for a General Audience

These days, when bids are assessed, experts (who Miller Heiman refer to as Technical Buyers) typically only form a small part of the assessment process. Most business decisions are made by panels and most people on a panel will have little technical expertise in the solution that is being assessed. So, your content should be prepared with this in mind and use only the minimum of technical jargon that is needed to establish credibility. 

Different stakeholders access and assess written information differently, and almost no-one reads sequentially cover-to-cover. By having clearly-written text with regular visual elements (bullet lists, tables, graphs, charts, icon sets and infographics), your audience can quickly find the information they are seeking. This can then be adjusted to favour the primary readership (favouring tables in financial sections, infographics in summaries, flow diagrams in operational sections, and so on).

The copy in your content library should facilitate this. Individual answers or bid sections might be assembled from multiple library records, and bids when taken as a whole might contain copy from hundreds of records, so maintaining consistency of copy across those records is a useful practice. Within this copy there should be:

• Short, clear sentences to ensure that your copy is easy to understand
• Plenty of signposting (headings, use of bold…) so that your readers don't get lost
• Regular callouts of the most important points
• Paragraphs of only a few sentences to aid skim (and non-sequential) reading
• Consistent use of terminology to aid understanding of the details of your offer

A bid glossary is also hugely helpful in maintaining consistency over several thousand records in a content library, produced months apart by different authors. It's also a great induction tool for new starters within the sales and bidding community.

By writing library records simply and consistently, the sections of your bid that are assembled from them should, without any redrafting, be easy to dip in to and out of, skim read, and/or navigate directly to the bits that are of particular interest to your readership.

Points Mean Prizes

Most business decisions are about more than just price. So, whether overtly or not, almost all bid content is scored. The content that you (or your SMEs) write for your library should always take this into account. Done well your responses will communicate more effectively, score more highly and, as a result, your bids will be successful more often. 

Some questions require a purely factual answer (in the form of a certificate, a policy, a process, a statistic…). For the rest, there’s likely to be some discretion for the assessor to give more points to a strong answer over a weak one, even where the facts of these different versions are equivalently-weighted. 

Writing for a bid should be done with some variety to keep the reader’s attention. However, that’s not helpful in the context of a library, where standardisation of presentation aids search and retrieval. Variety can come later, through editing. 

Maximising scores requires presenting all the information that the assessor needs, in the order that they request it. A sensible order in which to structure a record is:

• What is it? 
• What does it do?
• What does that mean for the client? What benefit does it bring?
• What evidence do you have to support that assertion? 

Ask your SMEs to respond to these questions, in this order, and you’ll always have the bones of your perfect answer to hand even if the order changes later for presentational reasons. 

Find your Voice

Bids are assembled from content drawn from a variety of sources, written by different authors at different times and often (at least in the early stages) without knowledge of the content of the surrounding sections. However, in order to avoid distracting the reader, the final version needs to have a common voice, as if a single individual wrote the entire document. If your library content already has a common voice, this work becomes significantly easier. 

Your organisation may already have a writing guide. If not you can always adopt someone else’s (see e.g. here and here for a couple that I have used in the past, and there are lots more here) or at least cherry-pick the most important sections. Some targeting of your writing guide is generally sensible, so have a shorter version containing the "must do's" for occasional contributors and a longer, complete version for those with a formal content governance role.

Worked examples of good and bad practice can be taken directly from past documents with minimal effort, once commercial elements (and any ability to trace bad copy back to the original author!) have been removed, and provide accessible guidance for those who do not have an academic grounding in use of grammar. Issuing this as a pack to contributors at the start of any new writing task sets the expectation and should reduce the requirement for revision later on.

By being diligent in your housekeeping during the times when you are not under pressure, the content in your library will be safe for use at a time when you are under pressure and so prone to making mistakes. Consistency, standardisation and documentation are the tools you need for success. 

Next time, I will discuss how to build governance processes to recheck that the copy of your content library remains accurate and fit-for-purpose in the future, as your organisation evolves. 

Copyright ? Alpha Lima Limited 2019