Quick Tips to Help You Win Business

Ahead of our seminars in September and October, we’ve compiled some quick tips to help you win business with your bids and presentations.

Improve your writing style

Use shorter paragraphs. Ideally, they should be 4 lines max, so people can skim read quickly
Use shorter sentences. 1-1½ lines long is ideal. If they’re longer, you’re probably joining two shorter sentences with “and”, “but” or “so”.
Ensure your titles are interesting and personalised. An easy way to do this: imagine your current title is “Our Proposal” (this is your agenda) and you’re writing to someone who wants to free-up staff time (the benefit to them), insert “how” before and the benefit to them after. So “Our proposal” becomes “How our proposal will free-up your staff’s time”.

Make the titles better. Use the technique mentioned above – create interesting, personalised titles.
Cut back on content. The easiest way to do this:
- write the full version with word-y slides
- print this out so you have a set of speaker notes
- press “delete” a lot, leaving only the key points
Use visuals. You don’t have to use drab bullet points. Communicate your points as a flowchart, a bar chart, a pie chart…a picture speaks a thousand words!

Where possible, send them late, not early. Do your selling verbally – that’s more persuasive than any document could ever be. Then send your proposal which confirms what has been agreed, rather than doing the selling for you.
Put the price at the end, after you’ve listed all the value you’ll bring. This puts your price in a better light. It also puts it in context. Saying ‘it costs €100,000’ before saying what ‘it’ is makes the number meaningless.
Agree the proposal headings with the buyer. Nothing highlights poor scoping more than the buyer saying “This isn’t the information I need. And if you can’t get the document right, I doubt you can do the project”. Also, knowing the headings makes it easier and quicker for you to write.