Posted by Jon
Those of you in the UK may have been following the political satire “The Thick of It” over recent weeks. One of the characters – number 10’s spin doctor – is played by an actor called Vincent Franklin. I stumbled across something he wrote for a corporate audience the other day, and it resonated with the work we do on proposals:
Those of you in the UK may have been following the political satire “The Thick of It” over recent weeks. One of the characters – number 10’s spin doctor – is played by an actor called Vincent Franklin. I stumbled across something he wrote for a corporate audience the other day, and it resonated with the work we do on proposals:
Writing is about editing. Only a genius gets it right first time. So once you’ve written something, it’s time to make it better…
[E]ncourage people to share their work and get feedback early on. If you wait until people have put hours and hours into something, how open are they really going to be? So share plans and first drafts, not just highly polished work.
Now, most proposal processes incorporate some form of ‘red team’ process: letting one or more independent reviewers scan through a near-final draft of your proposal so they can make positive suggestions for improvement. But, of course, that’s too late to do anything other than fine-tune the document – even if such fine-tuning can add several percentage points to your evaluation score: I’ve known good red team reviews to have made the difference between finishing second and winning the deal.
RSS Feed
