EP080: Finding the Right Proposal Length – with Lisa Rehurek
How long should your proposal be?
Yes, you want to give evaluators all the information they need so you score the maximum points. But there’s a fine line between adding the right amount of detail and overwhelming your reader!
So, how do you describe what you do, how you do it and why it’s important in a concise, accessible way?
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I’m sharing my top four tips for finding the right proposal length, challenging you to create a balance between providing sufficient detail and making your response easy to read and evaluate.
I explain why it’s crucial to stay on topic and avoid wordiness, describing how to eliminate any information that isn’t necessary and cautioning you against including upsells as a way to differentiate your business.
Listen in for insight on writing your RFP response at the most appropriate reading level and learn how to keep your content relevant by building a mini-outline for each question before you begin!
Key Takeaways
How to create a balance between providing sufficient detail and keeping your proposal readable
The benefit of putting together a response template with a mini-outline for each question
My top 4 tips for finding the right proposal length
1. Stay on topic
2. Ask yourself, ‘So what?’
3. Eliminate anything that isn’t relevant
4. Avoid wordiness
The art of describing what you do, how you do it and why it’s important in a concise and readable way
Why you shouldn’t try to differentiate yourself with upsells in a proposal
My why-what-how approach to layering an answer in your RFP response
Why most proposals should be written at a sixth- or seventh-grade reading level
How to use the readability function in Word (and teach your technical writers to use it too)
RFP Success Show EP80 Transcription
(00:00):
You're listening to The RFP Success Show, with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20%, 30%, and even 50%. And meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
(00:24):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to The RFP Success Show. I'm your host, Lisa Rehurek, founder and CEO of The RFP Success Company. And welcome to our new 2021 format, where I will provide you with teaching tips and strategies to help you up-level your proposal game.
(00:41):
So today's topic is all about proposal length, and we have recently had a few clients that we've had conversations with about this. And I thought, "Oh, this is such a great topic to approach on the podcast, because it is a little bit of an art to figure out how concise to be in your proposal." So I'm going to give you a few thoughts and a few tips on how you need to think about this when you are putting your proposal together.
(01:11):
So look, determining proposal length, it's difficult, because there's this very fine balance between providing all the necessary information, with that sufficient detail, but also making your proposal readable and evaluatable. That's not really a word, but I just made it one. So you've got to make it so that the reader wants to keep reading, that they read the important points that are going to get you the score that you want. So you don't want to overwhelm them with too much information, but you also want to give them sufficient information, so that they have the details that they need in order to score you appropriately.
(01:50):
So there's this fine line, right? And we do see a lot more proposals these days coming out with a request for concise answers, concise information. When they use that word, it's likely because they're tired of getting these pages-long proposals that they don't have time to read. They don't have interest in reading, and they want people to get to the point quickly.
(02:17):
So when you're thinking about this, when you're planning things out, one of the first things that I suggest that you do is think about it at the onset of your proposal. So what we do at the very beginning of any proposal that we are developing is that we put together the response templates. And within that template, we'll put the question that was being asked, and then we put some guidelines about how we want to answer that, whether it be maybe information in the table, sub-headers, things like that. An important point, so that when the writer is writing, they've got something to sink their teeth into.
(02:54):
And that's a really good opportunity to outline what exactly are the key areas that you want to respond with? And the great thing about this is there's a little bit of pre-planning here, so in essence, what you're doing is you're making an outline, not just an outline of the big sections, which is what most people do, but then start putting some mini outlines together for each of the questions. Yes, I know it takes time, but I guarantee you that you'll reap the benefits from it. And it's really actually going to help you in the long run, because the more you lay it out for yourself or your writers, whoever's writing, the better it's going to be for them and the easier it's going to make it for them. And then easier for whoever's got to pull it all together to make it sound good in the end. So it might feel like there's more time on the front end being spent, but it's going to save you on the back end. So put a little outline together of how you want that answer to flow.
(03:50):
Here's a few other tips. Number one: Stay on topic. So as you revise your work, check that the content of each sentence, of each paragraph, is relevant and necessary. And for technical writers, in particular, this gets hard, because they think everything is relevant and necessary. And what you have to make your brain do is go back and say, "Okay, let me look at the question that they have asked and let me think about why they're asking this and what they're trying to achieve by asking this question." And then, "What information do I need to provide to them to make sure that they can give us the maximum points?" If they read our proposal, they're going to be like, "Yes, these people can do this." And guess what? In order to give you maximum points, that does not equal a ton more content. It's just the opposite. Can you describe what you do and how you do it and why it's important in a very concise and easily readable way? That is a skill. It's an art, but that's exactly what you need to do. Okay, so make sure you're staying on topic.
(04:58):
Another tip is to ask yourself: So what? As in, why does this matter now to the client? One of the traps that we fall into is that we think that the way that we're going to differentiate ourselves is that we're going to show them all these bells and whistles of things that we do, the extra things that we do. That's not how you differentiate yourself; that's how you overwhelm the evaluators. So leave out that extraneous information. That's your job to do later. After you get this contract, you'll have plenty of opportunity to up-sell them into other products and services, but for now, what do they need to know in order to score you the maximum points? And that's all you should be putting in that answer. Don't go crazy with too much more.
(05:44):
Eliminate anything that isn't relevant, based on the question that they asked. And this goes back to the best way to do that is really to outline each question prior to writing. Here are the key points that we want to talk about. So outline your key points, and within each of those key points, we also suggest that you organize it in a way where you start out with the why. Why are you the ones that have the right solution for them? And then go into the what. What is it that you're going to do for them? And then go into the how. And so if you layer your answers that way, it's going to give you a flow that the evaluators are going to be able to follow. And when you've got skimmers, which you will have, people that do not read word for word; they're going to skim. They're going to get what they need out of that front-end stuff. And then the people that need more detail will go deeper into the how.
(06:37):
So that's one of the ways that you can organize that.
(06:40):
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(07:06):
And then the last tip is really avoid wordiness. And what that means is avoid unnecessary phrases, redundant words, things that don't need to be there and just complicate for the reader. Most proposals should be around a sixth or a seventh-grade reading level, and I know there's people that are listening to this that are cringing at that, but it is amazing how important that is. And I had a hard time wrapping my brain around that to begin with, too, but if you look at all of the big magazines, they all write to anywhere between a fourth-grade level, some right up to a 12th-grade level. I would say Harvard Business Review and maybe some of those, The Economist, maybe go up to 12th grade, but you don't know who your audience is, necessarily, and the range of their ability to comprehend.
(07:56):
And I don't mean that in a negative way. When we are reading things that are technical and that are not in our wheelhouse, we all read at a much lower reading level. So there is actually a readability function in Word. If you're not familiar with this, get familiar with it. It's an add-on. You have to go in and add it. Just Google how to add the readability function in Word. And what that does is it gives you a score, and it tells you. You can highlight a paragraph or a whole section, and it will tell you at what grade level that paragraph is written for. And then it'll give you some suggestions for how to fix it, and it's pretty amazing.
(08:40):
The other thing that that does is it starts to train you on how to write more simplistically, how to write more concisely. And it's not going to happen overnight; you will learn as you go. I think it was probably year of me really working with that before I started, "Okay, I'm really tuning into this. It's really catching on." And still to this day, when I write ... Because I learned in corporate America, and we think that those fancy words and certain ways to say things make us sound smart, but when you're writing a proposal, you need to keep it simple, so that they can really consume the information that you're sharing with them. We want the evaluators to understand and absorb what we are telling them, and you've got to write it out very simply for them.
(09:28):
So conciseness is so important. We ask evaluators, any time we meet somebody, any time we have an opportunity to talk to an evaluator, even a past evaluator, current evaluator. We ask them: So what are some of your biggest pet peeves? And lengthy writing is one of their biggest pet peeves. It's always in the top three. So do not underestimate. Your technical writers are going to disagree. Your proposal writers, to some degree, might disagree. Most good proposal writers know how important it is to be concise, but it's hard, sometimes, to balance between what the technical folks are telling you, versus what you know to be true.
(10:11):
So I would say use these best practices. Use that readability function. Maybe teach your technical writers how to use that readability function, if they're open to it. But conciseness is so important to a winning proposal. There are no hard and fast rules, as far as how long your answers should be or how long your proposal should be. But again, if you think about it, put yourself in the shoes of the evaluators and think about what you would want to know if you were asking that question and what ultimate information you need in order to give somebody maximum points. And that's really what you want to write to. So conciseness is key.
(10:58):
Thanks so much for being here. That is our show for today, and thank you for listening.
(11:03):
This has been another episode of The RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@rfpsuccess.com. No matter your business size, industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, the RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20, and even 50%. Learn more at therfpsuccesscompany.com.