I’ve become so used to getting technical, pseudo-technical and incomprehensible narrative from contributors to my bids that I’ve long since stopped worrying about how it is written and just get on with translating it into plain English that us mere mortals can understand. So what? you might ask…well…

My inspiration for this post came from what I read on Elena Westbrook’s LinkedIn profile (Marketing Associate at Weaver in Texas) after she liked my last post. She has the most amazing introduction to what she does that just struck a cord with me and reminded me of what I have to do to ensure my clients are clearly understood by the people they want to win work from.

Elena’s LinkedIn profile introduction says,

…For more than 20 years, I’ve been a translator. I translate Engineerish, Sciencese and Accountish into plain English that non-specialists can understand — and not just understand, but be motivated by…

Fantastic!

But I am sure that she and I can’t be alone in this so it led me to wonder how prevalent this issues is and what impact it has on the time and the costs and the efficiency of bidding. I also thought about what might cause this issue to arise in the first place and look at how we might improve the performance of our bid and technical teams so that everyone feels more comfortable with writing in a way that can be easily understood by most people.

Thinking back, we first learn to write in school and that’s where our bad habits start. As we progress through college and perhaps on to university we read more technically orientated textbooks about our chosen subject that are often written in a particular style. We accept this as the familiar and generally accepted way of communicating…and so we start to copy!

As we become more proficient in business we use previous reports or bids to guide our style in a way we think is more acceptable to our peers (and bosses!) and doesn’t seem out of place. After all, we all want to be accepted…and so it goes on.

But when you look back at these sources of material they are often riddled with jargon, overly complicated sentences and long, highly technical explanations when simple ones would have done just as well. I’m not sure what the driver is but the authors may think that writing like this makes them look good (perhaps?) or more knowledgable but it has the potential to alienate people. You risk appearing to be too clever or too elitist to care whether your audience understands something that you probably know more about, and…

If you don’t take the time to explain things simply then you risk losing your audience

But let’s get beyond just the technical and look at general writing styles amongst professional people. I find that a ‘professional-eze’ style is often adopted in general writing with people using excessively long sentences in their narrative to sound as though what they are saying has more content or more gravitas when a much shorter and more direct sentence would have done just as well. Phewww, that was a bit long! But you know what I mean…

The problem is that messages can become woolly and the outcomes you’re client is keen to know about may not be clearly stated or just get lost. This is poor technique but our authors are copying it because they don’t know any better and we’ve got to help them.

Like many of you, my career started in a very different place to where it is now and I learned a very hard lesson early on. Having written what I thought was a successful bid we were invited to interview and the potential client and I connected really well… the conversation moved in and out of business with occasional humour thrown in for good measure…it felt good! But disaster was about to strike…I have never previously (and will never again!) leave a presentation and say, “…I think we’ve won that one…” because we didn’t!

A week later I spoke with our potential client and was told that he wanted to appoint us because he felt we would work well together. However, our conversation became more difficult when I was told that we had been unclear in our written submission and in our presentation about what we would achieve by the end of the project. Conversely, the rival bidder had told him exactly what they would deliver in plain, simple words and so our potential client decided to appoint them instead.

Arrrhhh…my poor technique had lost the bid and a considerable amount of money with wasted time and effort by our team.

So, if you don’t want to suffer the pain and humiliation that I suffered then I suggest you identify any such issues in your writing and presentations and train your technical writers to tone down their style to suit less technically qualified people- those more qualified to read the technical stuff can read it fully in the appendix. Show your authors, contributors and other client facing team members how to write in plain English so that it is simple and easy to understand by everyone. Chances are you’ll be speaking to many different people as I discussed in my post ‘How to Win Bids by Appealing to Your Audience’ so be sure to meet all their communication needs so you don’t miss anyone out.

Top Tips
Have a look back at a previous bid and see if you can easily understand what is written…then pass it to someone outside your business (your husband, wife, partner, trusted friend, mentor, etc.) and see if they easily understand what you’re talking about too. Then use the results to make any changes that might be necessary.

Please Share!
Our growing band of like minded people has an appetite for learning new ways of winning work and I’d like to know how common this issue is. Please share your experiences so we can all continue to learn and improve how we work.