What is the most appropriate collective noun for a group of proposal stakeholders? A tangle? An expectation? A concern? A cacophony?
The answer matters less than the reality they describe. Stakeholders, even when on the same team, are often at odds. Finance wants to push the margin. Legal wants to eradicate risk. Operations want delivery certainty. Bid writers just want to win. Something, sooner or later, must give.
Scroll through LinkedIn and you might believe there’s a magic cream that can soothe away these tensions and ease you to a collegiate utopia. Bad news, there isn’t one. Most suppliers are, to some degree, clunky – and arguably need to be.
So where does that leave us? Let’s take one universal battleground: proofreading.
Proofreading a bid is where ten people already agree that the answer is perfect, but then still change the same sentence in ten different ways.
Too often, stakeholders review without sight of the specification or scoring criteria. The result is predictable: feedback driven by instinct rather than intent, opinion rather than outcome. It is simultaneously both essential and contradictory, and only ever arrives five minutes before submission.
There is also an unwritten rule that stakeholders must add a sufficient weight of comments, changes, and fingerprints to justify their involvement, whether warranted or not. And, yes, like you, I have been guilty of these crimes.
The fundamental question every proofreader should instead ask is simple: will this edit make the bid more likely to win? A second question should follow immediately: have I been clear enough for the writer to act on it?
Vague comments like “I would not say it like that” or “We should soften the language” invariably leave writers pulling their hair out (and in my case that is already in very short supply).
Instead, we want stakeholders to guide us as to whether this a must change or a could change? If more detail is needed, what should be removed to make room? If clarity is lacking, what would “good” look like?
At its worst, stakeholder feedback is proof that everyone has read the bid, albeit not necessarily the same one. All too often the discipline of good proofreading is overlooked.
A little education, knowledge, and guidance to make stakeholders better proofreaders inevitably, in turn, makes the writers better, well, writers. The stakeholders make clearer and stronger challenges, the writer better appreciates, and pre-empts, the concerns from the stakeholder’s hilltop, and review cycles become more efficient.
Better proofreading doesn’t just improve bids. It improves how stakeholders work together to win them. And if you can win that battle, then you’re well on your way.
Jim Carley
Jim Carley is the Business Development Director for Shaw Trust, a national charity providing employability, education, and independence support primarily for people with disabilities and limiting health conditions. He was formerly the Founder and Managing Director of Carley Consult, an award-winning bid consultancy, which he subsequently sold, and has over 25 years’ experience in proposal writing and bid management.
