Great article yesterday on CapturePlanning.com about using the quality of your writing as a discriminator in helping you win proposals.

I’ve long felt that most proposals are written in a style that’s at once stiff, boring, jargony, dense . . . nigh on unreadable. Every proposal seems to contain the worst of business writing distilled (or usually expanded) into one mind-numbing document.

This article suggests that proposal writers instead employ the best of business writing in their props — writing that is conversational, direct, and passionate. Writing that has personality, and that tells a story.

Here at Dragonfly, we edit literally hundreds of proposals every year. In 15 years, I’ve yet to see one written in such a style.

Now that would be a key discriminator.

[Note: For you non-proposal-heads out there, "key discriminator" is proposal jargon for the cool aspects of your company that set you apart from your competitors.]

One of our favorite clients recently called recently to find out if we could edit a 250-page federal proposal over the weekend.

“No problem,” I told her. “That’s what we’re here for.”

Then she told me that the proposal was just in draft form, and about 100 pages would eventually be cut out of it. That’s when I put on the brakes.

Even though I was happy to do the work (and told her as much), I advised her that it was a waste of her and her company’s money to hire us. They would be paying us to copyedit material that would subsequently be heavily revised — if not cut. If the material had to be scrubbed for political reasons — to be cleaned up for a C-level review, for example — well, we’d do the job. But our strongest recommendation was that the document not be copyedited at this stage in the game.

Guess what? They took our advice. Sure, I gave up some 40 or 50 billable hours of revenue as a result. But I think it’s more important in the long run to help our clients spend money wisely, and at the right time.

That’s what we’re here for.

Yes, it’s true. I love my clients. And I love ‘em even when their requests are outside-the-pale goofy.

Take yesterday, for example. Dear customer called in the morning to ask if we could edit a 100-page proposal by end of day. Our response: No prob, Bob, send it on.

Customer then called back to say we only needed to edit 20 pages, and could we do that as quickly as possible. Our response: We’re all over it.

Dear customer then proceeded to send us all 100 pages over the course of the day. Without giving us a heads-up that he was doing this.

It was so silly, I couldn’t even get angry. I had to laugh.

And in actuality, I know what it’s like to be at the end of a proposal effort, when you’ve been working ’round the clock for days on end and you can barely keep track of what time it is, let alone what it is you have left to do.

So I just smiled and did the work (with the help of three other editors). And thought to myself, I love this crazy, crazy client.

This is for all you proposal writers out there … Ben Yoskovitz at the InstigatorBlog talks about the top 10 reasons why proposals fail. A few of his most important points:

They don’t reference the prospect’s pain. Why did the prospect ask you for a proposal? You better have a crystal clear answer to that question. Too many proposals don’t reiterate the pain properly. Skipping that makes the prospect feel like you don’t get it.

They’re too technical. I know you’re the expert in your field — that’s why I asked for a proposal. You don’t need to inundate your proposal with buzzwords and industry-hooey. A prospect knows only a smidge of what you know about your business, and they don’t really want to know more. Your proposal fails when it sells industry mastery using language I won’t understand.

They’re not selling benefits. Proposals that miss out on #2 and focus too much on #3 invariably aren’t selling benefits. If you’re not selling benefits you’re sunk. And for the love of everything that is holy, spell these out as clearly as possible.

And of course, we’ve got to include this one:

They’ve got spelling and grammatical problems. A proposal with spelling errors is unacceptable, it’s as simple as that. Grammatical problems may be harder to catch. Three tips: Read it out loud. Write short sentences. Have someone else read it.

And I will be even more specific about that last part: don’t just ask “someone else” to read it … ask a professional copyeditor.