The better you think you are at writing (and you might be truly excellent), the harder a proposal can be, and the reason is always the same – you thought you could smash it out from cold, just like you do your normal blog posts, short stories and medium articles.
A lot of it is down to planning, of course – if you take a proper look at how you write everything else compared with the last proposal you struggled with, you’re likely to find you put a lot less time into planning out the story for your proposal than you did that article you wrote about your preferred topic, but even when you do all the planning, you’re still going to struggle from time to time, and that’s when the real reason comes to light.
Simply – you don’t understand what it is you’re writing yet.
A plan or structure helps you make sure you tell a complete story in a logical order, but filling in the gaps – the all important actual words – requires your brain to understand what it is supposed to be saying, and be able to easily rift on the subject matter. This is why you’re usually quite good at writing – because you’ll be doing so on a subject that you’re passionate about, and you have a lot of background knowledge on.
When it comes to writing a proposal, you have to have two things absolutely cemented in your mind:
These things might seem very obvious, but you’d be surprised how often I’ve been called in to help someone who is struggling with a proposal who hasn’t gotten a grip of either of these points – they’ve literally just decided on a structure and decided to start writing.
In reality, it’s not as easy as you think it is to have both points sorted in your mind. Point 1 comes with exposure to your product, and is usually the one that bid writers are clear on, but point 2 is where a lot of people fail to prepare (and thus should be prepared to fail, as the saying goes).
When you think about it, if you don’t really know what it is you’re selling, or how it applies in this particular situation, how can you possibly write anything about it? Everything you write will be made up on the spot, which makes it hard to maintain a consistent flow and narrative, and you’ll find yourself regularly stopping, editing, and referring back to what you’ve already written to see if just how badly you’ve gone off target.
If you’ve ever done public speaking, you’ll likely have experience of two situations: the first is where you’re asked, with little warning, to talk about a subject you’re well versed in. Because you know it well, and are passionate about it, you’ll be able to stand up and talk comfortably for however long is needed, and happily (and accurately) answer questions at the end.
The second situation is where someone’s dropped out, and you have to deliver their talk for them. It’s not your subject matter, and at best you’ve only seen them give this talk once or twice from the sidelines. Even with a solid pitch deck, you’ll be a lot less confident, and you’ll positively avoid any questions. If possible, you’ll avoid giving the talk in the first place, because you know it won’t be nearly as good.
If you’ve done public speaking long enough, you’ll remember a time when you felt over-confident about your speaking ability because of situation 1, that you agree to do a talk on something that isn’t your chosen subject matter, without time to properly prepare and without anyone else’s tried and tested slides to help you. And you’ll remember failing miserably.
This is directly comparable to writing a proposal.
It’s also not always evident that you don’t yet fully understand your brief, as you could be a good way into a proposal before you get to the point where knowing the detail really matters. The stuff you’ve written could be improved with more focus of course, but it will have come from your passion / knowledge of what you were writing about so it will have flowed easily.
And then suddenly, a hard stop. Writers block? Maybe, but mostly (entirely) it’s because you don’t know what it is you’re writing about.
Luckily, it’s as simple as that to recognise. If you’re struggling to write; if it’s not flowing; if you’re not already thinking about the next paragraph or section as you write the current one: you don’t really understand your challenge yet.
SO STOP WRITING
Go back to the brief, and your solution, and plan out your response. Write bullet points for everything you want to say, and tick them off as you say them.
You might be tempted to use AI to write things for you, but this won’t really help, as you’re just avoiding the learning and planning part of writing a response that got you into this spot in the first place. AI can be a great aid for checking grammar and helping you improve your writing if you’re still quite new to it, but it shouldn’t be used to come up with the ideas and story for you.
The simple fact is, you also can’t really get a good response out of AI without doing this work anyway, because if you don’t understand enough of the challenge to write it, how can you brief an AI bot on what you want it to say?
The objective is for you to understand what you’re selling, and how it applies to this client’s requirements. Once you can tick off both of those boxes, you’ll find that your proposal writing becomes much easier, as you’ll actually know what it is you’re talking about.
