Improving your responses - controlling the narrative

When you're writing an open proposal, it's important to make sure you tick off all of the client's requirements, using their words and phrases, and in a logical, understandable manner. But you don't have to stop there.

If you ONLY tick off all of their requirements, you’re missing out on a very real opportunity to not only strengthen your own proposal, but also weaken the offer of other suppliers by marginalising what they might be offering.

To be clear, this isn’t about doing anything underhand – you’re not going to be spreading rumours about the competition, or over-promising on what you will deliver. Rather, it’s all about framing.

There’s two things you should be doing whenever possible. The first is marginalising what you can, if it suits you to do so.

In example, many suppliers will use their project process as a USP for a project that requires a lot of planning. Others will point to their 300 previous websites built in WordPress as the reason they should be picked to develop this new WordPress website.

If those points don’t suit you, then you can marginalise them, quite legitimately, simply by dismissing them.

After all, who DOESN’T have a project process that’s been refined by both success and failure? Who can’t knock out a decent WordPress install these days? These are commodity skills, and it’s a given that we’ll be delivering these things!

We’re all adults, we know what a good CMS is and how to deploy it. ‘A good CMS’ is not really one of your project challenges, because that comes out of the box. Your real challenge comes in how that CMS can publish pages that not only look great, but scale as your user-base requires it. You mention ‘conversion’ as a core requirement, but how can you convert anything if your visitors can’t even find it? Our unique approache to bespoke development means we don’t just list your events, we actively promote them to your visitors based on their preferences and browsing habits. Conversion marketing is only hard when the user can’t find something they want.

Now, I’m not saying you write exactly these things, but as a very quick example you can see how I’ve taken the client’s needs and twisted them to suit my own aims, all whilst still saying we’ll deliver them ourselves, AND making any proposal that simply meets those needs potentially feel a little inadequate in comparison.

Change the client’s needs to suit you

Somewhere in your proposal, you’re going to be listing out the client’s key requirements or challenges. Let’s do that quickly as a simple list:

1. User-friendly CMS with full editing capabilities
2. Ability to integrate third party forms and other embeddable tools and media
3. mobile-friendly design
4. Ability to list events and provide a simple booking form
5. Ability to list products and integrate with Paypal payment buttons and cart

These are fairly typical requirements, and pretty much any competent digital agency could deliver on them without any hassle at all. So how do you make it more specific to you?

Very simply, you add things to the list.

Of course, it would be easy if you could just add “6. Choose my agency” to the list, but that’s not going to happen…but what you CAN do is add things that the client needs, that suits you, they’ve not really thought about. Ideally, you’ll be adding things they’ll instantly recognise as a great idea, but at the very least you should be aiming for things that make them go “oh yeah, that too”. With that in mind, we’re not looking to add anything obvious.

So, let’s take that list again, and add some things that this client is almost certain to wish they’d put on that list:

1. User-friendly CMS with full editing capabilities
2. Full GDPR compliance and active, automated security and malware scanning including backups
3. Ability to integrate third party forms and other embeddable tools and media
4. mobile-friendly design
5. Ability to list events and provide a simple booking form
6. Intelligent search system that allows easy filtering, automated recommendation and cross-event promotion based on user preferences and behaviour
7. Ability to list products and integrate with Paypal payment buttons and cart

Here I’ve added 2 simple points. In honesty, the GDPR / security one will almost certainly be covered in any real tender documents, but this is purely an example.

The point is, the client is going to read those points, absolutely agree they should form part of their project, and now you have two points in their requirements list that YOU control, and you can base your proposal around. You’ve effectively anchored your proposition into their minds and can now set to work strengthening your USPs.

Even when a client is reviewing submissions against a check list, these additional points still stand a good chance of forming part of any ‘value added’ criteria, and as you’ll have ensured you still confirm that you’re delivering the original, basic points anyway, there’s no real way to harm your submission doing this.

Combined, and with a little bit of thinking (remember – the above are simple examples), you can make sure that your USPs really shine in a project, and if done right you can even make any competitor who has simply ticked the boxes look a little bit naff in comparison.