10 Jun How To Connect With Buyers By Telling The Story Of Your Business
Winning tenders involves more than just having an effective bid strategy and compelling evidence – it’s also about connecting with your buyers.
To make a good impression, your buyers should feel inspired by your company and invested in your story. Your tender should stand out from your competition, keeping readers engaged until the very last word. This will ensure that your business remains memorable to the buyer, even after they have reviewed multiple tender submissions.
In this article, we will explore methods to keep people engaged throughout your bid, and outline how to put these principles into practice.
Bid Writing Doesn’t Have To Be Boring!
A good bid should have a developed form and structure, be directed at your target audience, and keep your readers interested until the very end. If you feel bored while writing your bid, there is a good chance those reading it will be bored too!
Plan your bid so that engaging points are consistently included throughout the text from start to finish, and try to use these to build a relationship with your buyers.
Understand Your Audience
In order to write a compelling bid, you will need to understand who your audience is and what they’re looking for in your bid response.
To assist with this, you should carry out in-depth research of your potential client before you start writing the bid. The research can include defining what type of business they are, identifying their usual target audiences, studying their values and working practices, and learning about their likely goals.
This information will be invaluable in terms of tailoring your bid to the specific wants and needs of the client; consider how to ensure all the key points in your tender directly satisfy what the buyer is looking for.
Set The Tone
The tone of your bid will vary depending on the type of work you do and your brand identity. But it’s important to note that you can always write an engaging bid while remaining professional.
Finding the right balance throughout your bid may seem a fine line to walk, but it can be more easily achieved by striking the right tone in a particular section of the bid, and then editing others to ensure they are consistent with the style and structure of this section.
As a general rule, avoid slang, and try to make your passion for your business shine through in your writing. After all, if you don’t believe in your business, why should anyone else?
Create An Attention-Grabbing Opening
Your opening line is critical to crafting a compelling bid, as it forms your reader’s all-important first impression.
You can achieve an engaging opening by starting with an interesting statistic, a common problem, a thought-provoking question, or an intriguing story from your experiences which your reader may relate to.
Establish Themes
One of the features that makes any story compelling is thematic elements. For example, Romeo and Juliet centres around themes of forbidden love and death, while Hercules depicts loss and the wrath of the Gods.
When considering the story of your business, what themes can you identify that might engage your readers, and how can you use them to craft a compelling narrative?
Themes that your readers can relate to are especially effective – for example, you might choose to depict your business as the ‘underdog turned hero’, which started at the bottom but put in the hard work to reach the top.
You could achieve this effect by discussing the challenges your company faced during its growth, how you overcame them, and how you made the business stronger by using the knowledge that you gained.
Use A Narrative Arc
Just like if you were telling a story, your bid should have a defined narrative arc. This goes further than just a ‘beginning, middle, and end’; it should have an introduction, a build-up, a climax, a resolution, and a conclusion.
During your introduction, you should set the stage for your bid – like, for example, by stating what you will cover in the bid. Then, you can move on to the build-up, where you introduce the bid’s key themes and information.
By the climax of your bid, you should have built up enough suspense that your reader is eager to learn more about your business, and any questions they have should be answered in the resolution. Finally, at the conclusion stage, you should summarise all the information in your bid response and address your overall key arguments.
Build A Relationship With Your Reader
Consider how businesses use their branding and advertising materials to build a rapport with potential customers. In a similar way, your readers will feel more connected to your business if you can build a relationship with them through your writing – this can help foster a bond and sense of loyalty towards your organisation.
To help achieve this, you could share a personal anecdote, discuss the ethics and values of your company, or outline a core passion that drives what you do.
Avoid Jargon Where Possible
If your buyer does not understand the points you are making in your bid, they will most likely become disinterested and unengaged, leading to an unsuccessful bid. Therefore, you should always try to communicate information to your readers clearly and assume they do not know the meaning of industry jargon and acronyms.
If you do need to use acronyms, for their first use you should always provide the full name of the object before then stating the acronym in brackets – for example, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).
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