I am in a strange season of life right now.
At the time I am writing this, my son will be moving out of our house to go to college in less than two weeks.
So, this summer we have been checking things off the list.
Trips we wanted to take together. Sporting events we wanted to see. Things we wanted to do as a family while he was still living under our roof.
And there is apparently a fairly long list of movies my husband and I consider required viewing that our son has somehow made it to 18 without seeing. So, we have been working our way through the watch list, too.
Recently, we watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
I have seen this movie hundreds of times. I know the scenes. I know the jokes. I can practically recite parts of it.
But this time, one line hit me differently.
Steve Martin’s character, completely exasperated by John Candy’s endless storytelling, finally says:
“Here’s a good idea: Have a point! It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”
And I thought: That is GREAT proposal advice.
Maybe that says more about the amount of proposal strategy work I have been doing lately than it does about the movie.
But stay with me.
Our team has been inundated recently with proposal strategy, pitch development, and presentation coaching. And one of the things we keep coming back to is the same problem:
AEC firms have a lot to say. They don’t always have a point.
That distinction matters
Most proposals contain plenty of information.
Years in business. Number of employees. Relevant projects. Resumes. Technical approaches. Schedules. Safety statistics. Office locations. Awards. Methodologies.
All useful.
All potentially necessary.
And none of it, by itself, is a reason to hire you.
That is where I think proposal teams sometimes get into trouble.
We confuse providing information with influencing a decision.
We answer every question in the RFP. We fill every page. We find another project example. We add another picture.
Then we look at the finished product and think, We’ve made a really strong case.
Have we?
Or have we simply provided the selection committee with a lot of material and left them to figure out what it all means?
What Is the Point?
Before you write a section of a proposal, there is a question worth asking:
What do we need the client to believe after reading this?
Not: What information belongs here?
Not: What did the RFP ask for?
Not even: What do we want to tell them?
What do we need them to believe?
If the section is about your team, maybe the point isn’t that Mary has 23 years of experience and John has worked on 14 similar projects.
Maybe the point is that this team has worked together before, knows where this type of project typically goes sideways and can make decisions quickly enough to protect the client’s schedule.
Now the resumes and experience have a job to do. They are evidence.
If the section is about project understanding, the point isn’t to prove that you read the RFP.
The client already knows they have an occupied building, an aggressive schedule, or a complicated site.
Your job is to tell them what those conditions mean.
What risks do they create?
What decisions will matter most?
What have you learned from dealing with that problem before?
What would you do differently because you understand it?
That is where information starts becoming influence.
Stop Making the Client Connect the Dots
This may be one of the simplest ways to improve proposal quality:
Do not make the selection committee figure out why your information matters.
Connect the dots for them.
A similar project is not inherently persuasive. Tell me what happened on that project that prepares you for mine.
Twenty years of experience is not inherently persuasive. Tell me what that experience allows your project manager to anticipate that someone else might not.
A sophisticated process is not inherently persuasive. Tell me what it will do for my budget, schedule, risk or experience as the client.
That is the part firms too often leave unsaid.
And it becomes particularly important late in the buying process.
By the time a client is reviewing proposals or sitting across the table from a shortlist team, they are rarely trying to determine whether the firms are technically capable. Most of them are.
They are trying to determine who they trust, who understands them, and who gives them the most confidence about what happens next.
And at that stage of the funnel, more information isn’t necessarily going to move the buyer.
The Proposal Should Tell a Persuasive Story
When I say proposals need a story, I don’t mean they need to become cute or overly creative.
I mean there should be a central idea holding the whole thing together.
The title or theme on the cover establishes it.
The cover letter explains it—like a good movie trailer.
Your project understanding reinforces it.
Your experience proves it.
Your team supports it.
Your approach shows how you will deliver it.
The reader shouldn’t finish 30 pages later with a collection of facts about your company.
They should finish knowing exactly why your team makes sense for this project.
That is the point.
And apparently, Steve Martin has been trying to teach us this since 1987.
This Is What We Are Tackling Next in SmartSKILLS
Our next SmartSKILLS session is about moving proposals beyond compliance and toward persuasion.
We are going to look at proposals through the buyer’s lens: executive summaries, project understanding, relevant experience, team positioning, messaging and structure.
Most importantly, we are going to talk about how to make all of that content actually work together to influence a decision.
Because improving proposal quality doesn’t necessarily require adding more.
In many cases, it requires getting much clearer about what you are trying to say.
So, the next time your team is deep into a proposal, surrounded by resumes, project sheets, boilerplate and RFP requirements, borrow a little advice from Planes, Trains and Automobiles:
Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the evaluator.