Blog 16 - Storyboarding is crucial in writing successful bids and proposals
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The blog this week is from Jeremy:
A critical Top Tip - Storyboarding is crucial in writing successful bids and proposals
It's one of the biggest building blocks, one of the most important things to do, and proportionally - a key step that is very often missed. Our research shows that most organisations that bid for work (80%+) are extremely immature in their approach to bidding and don't conduct starboarding, among other basic best practices. It’s one of the main reasons why they lose on quality scores often. Having said that, I've seen issues that map back to a lack of storyboarding on the biggest US defence deals, in billions and billions of dollars, where we find large sophisticated bidders not answering the question or worse, they're inconsistent between responses.
Firstly, one of the key reasons why storyboarding is so important is that clients test for consistency. If you are inconsistent in how you describe how you're going to do something between responses - on the people involved, the technology you're going to use, the process you're going to deploy - if you're inconsistent between two of your responses in how you say you're going to do that - they'll mark you down for both responses. That's why fairly often you get scoring criteria that talks about confidence in your ability to deliver. And it is why you sometimes get asked the same questions twice, either identical questions twice in the same bid or questions that are quite similar - because they're testing you for consistency to give them confidence that you've not made it up, that it is really is your processes or approach.
Secondly, bidding for work is an incredibly precise sport these days. We’ve got to score every point. The world of bids and proposals are ever more competitive, particularly for the 20% of businesses that are actually good at this stuff - looking to go from good to great. Storyboarding is at the heart of how we drive performance on technical scores. And frankly, the more points you score for quality, the more headroom you've got on price and perhaps the more money you can leave in to make more margin.
So, what is a storyboard?
A storyboard is a plan for each response that you're asked to submit to a client. It breaks down their questions into their component parts. You're very rarely ever asked a single shot question. You will find there are three, four, five or more subcomponents to each question and you need to break down and answer something compelling and compliant for every aspect. The client has asked you all of the question and all of those subparts for a reason. You can't score top points if you don't give them a full response. But it also involves breaking down any scoring criteria into the component parts of that too.
In the UK public sector bidding, if they're following best practises, which isn't guaranteed - they should have some scoring criteria around added value, perhaps exceeding expectations and certainly on providing evidence and strength of evidence to prove and prove again that you've done a great job for others.
Storyboarding also provides us with the opportunity to ensure that we're compelling. They also give you a nice audit trail for later. When we get into green reviews, red reviews / first draught, second draught reviews - you can look at the storyboards, look at the responses that have been submitted for review and just check that we've executed on everything that we said we were going to.
There is a lot to it. In our full bid writing training programme we go into a great level of detail, in how to do it. But personally, I don't care how you do it in terms of tools you use and the approach you take. Every business is different in terms of the tools, the culture, the DNA, in terms of the sort of personalities and likes of the people involved and how to get the best out of them. It might be screen sharing, might be whiteboards, might be flip charts or good old post-it notes on a wall. I don't really care how you do it as long as you do do it. You break those questions and criteria down, make sure you're answering everything and then think through how to make sure you're compelling, evidencing effectively, etc
I hope you find that useful. Do reach out if you need a bit of training or upskilling in this space. It is absolutely crucial. It's at the heart of our training in how to execute well in the end game that is bidding.
Very best of luck.
Other Free Resources
We’re on a mission to help companies like yours win more work.
Here are some other free resources that should help you too. Feel also free to share them with friends and colleagues:
Free Bid Writing Basics Training Video - Our free exclusive bid writing basics training video will help you understand how to deliver your desired business growth and beat your business plan by winning more tenders. Watch the video here.
Writing Crown Commercial Services Bids - Learn to tackle the challenges of writing CCS Tenders here.
Our free work winning Podcast, the Red Review, can be found here.
You can also follow Jeremy on LinkedIn for hints, tips and insights here.
100% Typo Guarantee—Our blog posts are free-range. It was hand-crafted with love and sent out unfiltered. There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-post revisions. Therefore, I can pretty much guarantee that there is some sort of typo or grammatical error or literary snafu. Got a business to run and a three year old to Dad. Sorry.