Recycling is far too fashionable
There's nothing wrong with reusing and recycling consumer goods. There's everything wrong about doing the same with your new business proposals
At least this recycling is creative. Recycled fashion. Credit: Unsplash
We don’t believe in recycling. An unfashionable belief, we admit. But we see a lot of wasted effort and wasted words poured into written proposals. Proposals that should win new clients and fill the coffers with gold, but which squander their potential by recycling old material, using cut-and-paste content: proposals that lack cohesion and coherence.
Writing proposals is an art form. In our line of work, we come across an awful lot of slipshod, off-the-shelf new business proposals and presentation decks. These never succeed.
You spend all that time stitching the thing together and it ends up in the trash and polite, ‘Thank you for all your hard work. However…’ message.
The business has gone elsewhere – to a company which has made the effort to craft a piece of original thinking, originally phrased.
Because time is tight, all too often the authors of proposals – Requests For Information (RFI) or Requests For Proposals (RFPs) – try to save time by borrowing whole sections from previously written documents. They pad it out by regurgitating chunks of the client’s brief and accompanying documentation (stuff the client already knows). Much of the material is recycled: the bidding team’s résumés (CVs), for example, or the case studies, dropped in to prove competency in delivering the sort of solutions this prospective client might be looking to achieve.
Fatal mistake.
Recycling might be good for the planet but it is bad for winning new business. There is a problem with recycling content, especially content that was flawed and not very good in the first place. Every client needs a bespoke answer. Yes, it takes longer. But the results are immeasurably better. Taking time, effort and trouble to think through everything you say so it is personal to the people and the problem you are addressing pays better. Of course, we know this. We just don’t do it.
For example, the résumés of your team need to sing the praises of the unique contribution each person will make to this specific project or client (preferably with a picture of that person in situ at the prospective client’s store or using their product). Any case studies (a term we dislike – we prefer success stories) need to have specific relevance to this prospective client’s business. Everything should be tailored. But all too frequently, it isn’t.
Here’s an illustrative cut-and-paste example, typical of the type of thing we encounter.
In this example, the authors have stuck the team résumés at the back of their RFI documents. They are written in the standard résumé formula: a long list of important job titles and companies where this person had worked:
Johnny Superman [not his real name] is a creative, hands-on, senior marketer who has successfully led some of the biggest brands in retail and who has multi-category international experience in developing and implementing innovation, marketing and category strategy.
It doesn’t mean anything – it’s just a string of clichés squished together. What remarkable things has Johnny personally achieved? We’re not told.
The problem is that these biographies have been used so many times, and for so long, that no one putting together the RFP or RFI document has read them for years. So no one spots that the supposedly ‘jolly’ bit at the end of each résumé now makes the team sound so tired and old fashioned. For example:
When he’s not working, Steve spends his time on two wheels both on and off road or tinkering around with various old vehicles.
Tinkering around? This belongs in a 1950s potting shed rather than a C21st proposal for a multi million dollar international assignment.
Think about every word of your team’s biographies as if you were introducing them in person.
Naming rights and wrongs
Another frequently missed opportunity to differentiate: the document title.
It’s criminal to go to all the trouble of producing the proposal and then fail to introduce it properly. A while ago, I pitched for Energiser batteries. The company had just launched a new titanium battery. Being rather dull Brits, we entitled our pitch Presentation to Energiser Batteries. Not scintillating, is it? Doesn’t make your heart beat faster, does it? Our Chicago-based brethren came up with:
WELCOME TO A TITANIUM DREAM
Better, eh? You’d probably want to read that document and see that presentation, wouldn’t you? In fact, you’d probably want to go to the cinema and watch the damn movie. We went with their title, unsurprisingly.
How about if this document landed in your inbox:
Unlocking the prepped vegetable and hot bites category for profitable top line growth
It sounds about as exciting as a vegetable, be it prepped or un-prepped. And it doesn’t get any better. Here’s the first paragraph from the executive summary promising what’s to come:
A set of actionable platforms with suggested innovation, renovation and core activation initiatives, which will be compared and contrasted with existing global financial plans allowing for potential gap-closing.
A belter. That’ll have them gripped. This horribly convoluted sentence means: ‘We’re going to show you some practical new ideas which will make you grow more effectively.’ Holy cow. No wonder we don’t like new business if we think it involves writing nonsense like this. No wonder people dread receiving proposals if they know they’re going to have to wade through volumes of verbiage from Messrs. Jargon, Cliche & Padding.
What works better? How do you differentiate a proposal so it reads easily and compellingly? Let’s contrast the recycled opening paragraph of a bog standard proposal with the vibrant, brave version. Normally, RFPs – and the verbal pitch itself – kick off with a string of platitudes. This is for a big fast food company:
Thank you for the opportunity to present our solutions to you. We are immensely grateful for the chance to pitch for your famous company, and if you were to work with us you would be our second largest client. We have worked very hard on your business over the last month and we have been unstinting in our efforts to understand both the market dynamics of your sector and to get to grips with the intricacies of your operations ... blah, blah, blah. We feel very passionate about blah, blah, blah. And so on in this vapid vein.
The words die on the page. That vital opening paragraph has no soul. It sends the reader to sleep. The opportunity is lost.
(Imagine being the poor sod who has to read ten of these.)
By all means, acknowledge the scale of the opportunity but also make it personal to the team – invest your emotion in it. Be brave, not supplicant. We are so scared of demonstrating emotion in the guise of being professional that we lose any connection or sincerity with the audience. Get to the point. Use what little time you have to hit them between the eyes. Here’s a real pitch for the same project:
For every person on this team, this has been a defining moment. Only once in our careers are we likely to get the opportunity to pitch for a brand we have all grown up with, has been part of all of our personal stories and which offers the largest canvas on which to do the finest work of our careers. For every one of us, this is personal. But we are acutely conscious that making a change in your communications partner is probably the last thing you want to do right now when you are literally and metaphorically surrounded by a world changing at white-water pace. Sometimes it’s good to have a fixed point or two. So we thought it is beholden on us to make the case for why change is needed if not welcomed. These arguments are summarised below.
There followed five well-argued reasons that changing partners was both necessary and appropriate.
Everything you write and say must create the feeling that you and your company are better and different to all the others they will see. Lift and separate your offer by using language brilliantly to set out your stall so they really want to hear what you have to say. And talk to them as equals. You’ll get your relationship off to a better start if you do (no one likes a Uriah Heep creep.)
The management summary concludes:
The pressures you face at this moment are as extraordinary and testing as any previously encountered since you opened your first store in this country half a century ago. That moment represents a key inflection point in our nation’s culinary landscape. You changed how we eat forever. But the revolution you started two generations ago didn’t just change the way we eat – it also accelerated cultural change in our society.
Five decades later, we are again at a genuine economic, cultural and culinary crossroads. There has never been a more perfect time for you to reassert your uniquely inclusive, unquestionably innovative place at the heart of every community. This presentation is all about how we accomplish that mission together.
This is a show opening introduction – an invitation to an exciting presentation which is designed to make the client’s spine stiffen in anticipation. Whether your clients make BMWs or burgers, carpets or the Chrysler Building, the people who work for a company all want to be made to feel like what they do is important. They all want to feel that what they are doing is the equivalent of sending a manned mission to the moon. Your job is to make their spine straighten, their resolve stiffen, their sap rise. Using written and verbal language brilliantly, seductively, compellingly, will help them feel all of that and associate those feelings with you. And how you make them feel is what they will remember.
Is all of this easy? No. But winning business isn’t easy. It takes effort. Raising prose from the prosaic to the persuasive will make all the talent of your team, and the hard work you have poured into the pitch, shine. Your proposals need to do justice to the effort expended on creating solutions for your client’s problems. Because, as the greatest adman and persuader of all, Bill Bernbach, once said:
There is a world of difference between having a proposition that sells and selling that proposition.
The proposal is the shop window for your genius. For all that you can accomplish on behalf of your clients. Use that opportunity to make it dazzlingly good. Invest your heart and soul into writing the proposal. Do not recycle it. Instead, craft it, edit it, write it from scratch. If you do, you will probably win.
Then, start again on the next one. From scratch. No recycling. It’s bad for (new) business.