In the world of bid and proposal writing, your goal isn’t just to secure contracts or investment. It’s about ensuring your organization’s future.

And there is no silver medal. You win the gold, or you get nothing in return for your blood, sweat and tears.

 

Every proposal is unique, but the basic requirements are the same. Crafting a winning proposal is a highly skilled task that requires:

  • Satisfying compliance not only for the client but for your industry or sector.
  • Addressing all the proposals’s requirements which might involve complex technical specifications, timelines and pricing structures.
  • Delivering high quality, persuasive and compelling content that convinces the client that you are the best fit for the opportunity.

“It’s a very specific language game with very specific rules,” says Sean Williams, co-founder and global CEO of AutogenAI, which has created a proposal writing tool that takes support for bid teams to the next level.

 

Let’s look at some of the rules of the game, and then at how AutogenAI can help you win.

 

The challenges of proposal writing

Each bid must be tailored to the specific client requirements and industry standards, showcasing your ability to handle similar projects.

Alongside researching the requirements you also have to research the customer to ensure you understand their expectations.

Proposal writing often involves coordination across multiple departments and stakeholders. You have to keep communication strong and constant to avoid misunderstandings creeping in.

The tight deadlines for most proposals adds pressure to the process. You must allow time for proofreading and revision to ensure compliancy and alignment.

The writing task is likely to be spread across a series of sections that may be evaluated separately, so must not be cross referenced.

You have to answer questions one at a time, and answer only the question that you’re being asked, in a specific format and word limit, following different evaluation criteria for each answer or section.

You will probably have to supply evidence, case studies or statistics. If you are a big multinational company, your most relevant examples might be hard for your team to track down.

“Often there’ll be very strict scoring criteria about what makes you score, say, 10 out of 10 for an answer, or eight out of 10,” says Sean Williams. “If you give one example of innovation, you might score eight out of 10, but if you give two examples and they are compelling and go beyond the requirements, you score 10.

“It’s a form of writing where the procurement team have often partly told you how to win in that they’ve told you the rules for winning, but not always in an understandable way.”

Throughout, you have to build a logical, persuasive argument that makes a watertight case for you winning the contract.

As well as being factually accurate and truthful, your bid should have a clear, compelling narrative with key messages that link your answers together and reference what the client needs and values most. These “win themes” will be specific to your proposal but can include topics like innovation, sustainability, customer service and cost effectiveness.

 

Why standard AI tools don’t help

Language is almost the last human activity that artificial intelligence (AI) has learned to solve, because it is as complex as human thought itself. Every kind of writing (for example a poem, an instruction manual, a popular science book – or a bid, tender or proposal) is a different language game with different rules and different success criteria.

Large language models, the first wave of AI tools, can produce human-like text based on what they’ve read, but are not specific enough.  “If you don’t need the result to have a heavy relationship with fact, they can work, but they don’t work for bid writing,” says Sean Williams.

The AutogenAI solution

 AutogenAI’s proposal writing tool not only generates human-like language, but crafts compelling arguments that align with your company’s offering and the proposal’s requirements. The result is more winning bids in less time.

 

AutogenAI offers three sorts of AI from which you can choose each draft:

  • If your company wrote a successful bid last year, Library AI can pull key phrases or data from that document to help you craft a new proposal which also reflects your company culture and tone of voice.
  • Internet AI streamlines your research stage by finding the latest relevant, cited and accurate sources on the internet and ranking them in order of importance.
  • Ask Creative AI any hypothetical question and it will come up with answers relevant to your bid.

 

It then sees which options you are choosing, and offers you more of the same, so every draft that it produces is closer to your ideal – and closer to a winning bid. It produces drafts very quickly, letting you edit rather than write from scratch.

“It’s a tool that understands what you are going through and meets you halfway,“as Sean Williams says.

“By understanding the purpose and understanding the rules of the game better than anyone else we can build software that meets the requirements. For example, proposal answers need to be very well structured so we’ve created a piece in our software that allows you to structure well.

“Proposal writing needs to include ideas in different places so our ideation tool allows you to draw material from public and proprietary sources as well as making up ideas.”

AutogenAI powers through the more repetitive research, fact-checking and writing tasks, and improves readability, consistency and clarity. This frees your energy and creativity for where it can make the most difference: refining your ideas and perfecting the final document. And you have more time for strategy and building client relationships.

With AutogenAI on your team, you’ll write winning proposals in less time, and each one will be better than the last.