A brief guide to writing persuasively to influence your audience.
Who are you speaking to?
When you write a proposal, you are telling a story and trying to convince your reader that:
• You thoroughly understand your reader’s problem
• You have the best solution for that problem
• You want what’s best for your reader
Through crafting persuasive writing:
• Be personal - it focuses primarily on your reader’s needs and preferences
• Convey the probability of success - someone else’s solution might be appealing, but your goal is to convince your reader that your solution is more likely to succeed
• Be conclusive and leave no doubt as to the best course of action
Stronger, more influential proposals
Be specific
Even if you’ve solved a similar problem for someone else, you still have to show how that
success will translate to your audience’s unique environment and situation.
Do your homework - make sure your solution really fits
Don’t spare the details. Use real scenarios and precise statistics and measures to prove
your solution is right.
Make it personal
Discover what keeps your audience up at night and speculate on the corporate and
personal repercussions of inaction or wrong action. The best way to build urgency in a
proposal is to make your solution an alternative to real, personal pain.
Find common values
To create empathy, your audience must see that you care about the same things they do.
People like people who are similar to themselves
Understand their corporate and personal stances on business, social and environmental
issues to show your common ground.
Don’t just say what they want to hear
Make sure you can deliver what you claim and that you really care about what you say you
care about. Aim for a mutually beneficial relationship—the classic “win-win” situation.
Be conclusive. It leaves no doubt as to the best course of action.
Proof - establish the validity of your proposal with logic
State claims and provide proof to support them, ranging from the definitive:
• Technical specifications
• Test results
• Certifications
• Adherence to standards
• Evidence of past performance
• Testimonies of satisfied customers
• Citations of awards and recognitions
To persuade, you must follow every claim with a proof and show how that proof will apply in your reader’s world.
Appeal to the emotions of your audience
People make decisions as much on emotion as they do on logic. A time-tested persuasive technique is to express how inaction or the wrong action can jeopardise your reader’s well-being.
Telling a story about what might cause an outage or interruption to your reader’s business is a great way to bring awareness to a problem and its potential consequences - and a way to bring urgency to a decision.
Use vivid language.
Turning a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’
Some proposals are rejected because the writer makes it easy for the reader to say “no”. Use persuasive writing to remove all the roadblocks, by anticipating every point at which your reader may become uncomfortable, skeptical, or fearful.
Ask yourself the same questions your reader will ask you, such as:
• How will this work in my world?
• Who will do what work? And why can you do it better than I could myself or your competitors?
• How much will it cost? And how much will I save, now and in the future?
• How can I pay for it? And can I actually make money from it?
• Why should I do this now? Right now, instead of another time?
• How have you done this before? Have you done it for someone as individual as I am?
• Why shouldn’t I stay with the incumbent? Why can you do better than they have?
• How will you stay on schedule and budget? And how will you address scope creep if it happens?
Structure Matters
Your proposals will be more persuasive if you build them in a logical sequence.
Rhetorical appeals are the qualities of an argument that make it truly persuasive.
To make a convincing argument, a writer appeals to a reader in several ways,
however, there are four different types of persuasive appeals as detailed below:
Show your document’s structure
Make it easier for readers of your proposal to choose your solution, by considering these five techniques:
1. Write informative headings. Knowing that your readers scan, skim, and screen your proposals, write headings that describe the contents of every section and subsection.
2. Apply numbered and bulleted lists appropriately for easy reading and absorption.
3. Transition between sections. Just as readers can get lost within paragraphs, they can easily lose interest or the thread of your message from section to section and volume to volume.
4. Use transitions at the end of a section to pre-sell the content in the following section.
5. Describe ideas graphically. Use graphics to create a spatial organization for sections of content. Content plans use this technique to help contributors build content by describing what they see in the graphic.
Use graphics and multimedia to immerse your audience in the potential of your
solution
Graphics are powerful tools for persuading audiences. Graphic design influences:
• Credibility - people equate visual design with professionalism
• Receptiveness - we tend to absorb main points faster when viewing images versus text
• Memorable - we recall information more readily when presented with images
• Responsiveness - images trigger emotional responses better than words
A variety of design strategies can improve the persuasiveness of your proposals. Colour, content-revealing graphic layouts, informative graphs, and meaningful illustrations. Creating a comprehensive visual strategy that reinforces and enhances your textual messages is a key way to ensure your reader stays with your narrative and your narrative stays in their minds.
Providing product or service demonstrations delivers more tangible proof than mere words. As a result, multimedia presentations of process and product simulations increase persuasiveness even more.
Other than strict customer RFP requirements, leverage your narrative with modern video, animation, and simulation technologies as inserts into multimedia proposals.
Persuasion vs Influence
“Persuasion is presenting a case in such a way as to sway the opinion of others,
make people believe certain information, or motivate a decision.
Influence is having a vision of the optimum outcome for a situation or
organization and then, without using force or coercion, motivating people to work together toward making the vision a reality.”
Write Clearly
Clear writing can differentiate your proposals from those of your competitors, making your proposal easy to see, follow, and understand, making it easier for your readers to say “yes.”
Your goal is to make readers spend less time untangling your meaning and more time reviewing your solution.
Storytelling
Telling stories is apt for proposals because they are narratives about what one company plans to do for another and what it has done for other similar companies.
Six principles for effective storytelling:
1. Build emotion and connection with the audience by showing you fully understand their current situation and their hot buttons
2. Keep their attention. Examine what level of detail you are providing (not too much, not too little)
3. Ensure your story is easy to understand and will be memorable for the reader
4. Believe in what you’re selling. Show passion and positivity in your story
5. Demonstrate a clear and simple journey to the outputs your customer wants to achieve
6. Highlight why you are best placed to take your customer on this journey so you differentiate from your competition
Make sure you involve the customer, try telling their story and incorporating yours.
Proposal stories
• Life before - what your customer struggles with
• Tipping moment - explain what your customer needs to do to overcome the struggles (use features and benefits related to customer struggles to describe your product)
• Life after - explain what life after overcoming the struggles will be like (use value propositions)
Benefits of storytelling
A few benefits of storytelling are:
• Stories help the customer relate more quickly to your product
• Stories create fluency in the proposal and can glue separate parts together
• Stories make customers more easily put their trust in your products because you can proudly make statements about them
Using an active voice
Customers pay for results, so our proposals should actively express how we perform for them. To keep roles clear and actions clearly defined, write mainly in active voice.
Current word and Adobe InDesign software have a built-in readability statistics tool that can tell you the percentage of passive sentences in your writing and can convert passive sentences into active ones.
Write as you would talk
Using the same style of English you use in conversation, will make your proposal more open and accessible to a wide range of audiences.
• Use simple words with precision. Technical or professional jargon can sometimes demonstrate mastery of a subject and gain a technical reader’s trust. The best approach is to use nontechnical language, unless you are writing to technical experts only
• Build intimacy with your reader through personal pronouns. Directly addressing your reader in the second person is brief, more closely resembles the way people talk, and will help you avoid passive voice
• Use contractions (they’ll, they’re, let’s etc.) as needed to create an informal, friendly tone, and more conversational. Have the reader feel included in the writing
• Use a variety of punctuation to engage readers. The colon and dash are great for emphasising the importance of content that follows them in a sentence. How do you choose between them?
Use the dash when your tone is informal
Small writing / Write tight
Respect your readers’ time by providing everything that is necessary in the briefest space possible.
Readers “scan, skim, and screen” to conserve their attention for the messages that deserve it most.
Follow the eight techniques below for writing tight:
• State your idea up front and make sure everything else relates
• Keep paragraphs short
• Tie your sentences together to make unified paragraphs
• Use only the words your readers need
• Watch out for long strings of nouns in succession. Try not to use too many acronyms in a single sentence or paragraph as this can be confusing
• Use concrete images and precise measures
• Be consistent when using technical terms
• Stay positive
• Avoid tautology (unnecessarily repeating words already expressed, eg. 8am in the morning)
Plan to revise
• Always include ample revision time and cycles for your proposals to reduce overall cost, test the validity of your ideas, and ensure you are writing ethically
• Schedule downtime between writing and editing. A waiting period away from the document will allow you to find errors and validate ideas more easily and without emotional baggage
• Have your peers edit your work to ensure high-quality content, style, and grammar. Look for opportunities for substantive, grammatical, and general stylistic improvement
• Use functional reviews to ensure accuracy, persuasiveness, and appropriateness
Style Sheets
Use a style sheet to present terms consistently. Create a standard style sheet that denotes the preferred:
• Punctuation
• Capitalization (eg. MB versus mb)
• Industry acronyms/jargon (eg. KPI - Key Performance Indicator)
Using plain language
Use plain language so that readers can understand it quickly and easily.
Writing a successful written argument
Your proposal is a primary communication medium for you to solidify your offer to a buyer through mutual agreement.
Proposals are written arguments to gain a buyer’s agreement but also to enlist that buyer in solving a problem. Attempts to downplay the interpersonal relationship, the sense of people helping people, will only serve to diminish cooperation and trust, which are hallmarks of successful written arguments.
Don’t’ use proposals as technical references
All readers appreciate clear writing, even technical experts, keeping in mind that teams of analysts from a variety of backgrounds and expertise assess proposals. Technical readers appreciate clear writing as much as novices, because:
• Clear writing doesn’t “dumb down” content. It specifies who does what, shows how technology works and fits into a workplace, and provides guides and definitions for terms outside any reader’s expertise
• Clear writing clarifies ideas. Clear writing eliminates the mystery of jargon, conceptual shortcuts and the content density of acronyms so that ideas stand on their merits and become assessable to all who need to understand them
Summary
Persuasive writing is completely about the reader. Craft every strategy, theme, section, and line with the reader in mind.
Rely on the classic techniques of persuasion and adapt and enhance them using research in human behaviour.
Follow the principles of clear writing and plain language to improve your chances of winning business.
Analyse and understand your readers so you can anticipate their needs, write to their expectations, and accommodate their communication and cultural preferences.
Revise your work to reduce the cost of rework, to test the validity of your ideas revealed by plain language, and to ensure the integrity of your content.
Investigate ways to incorporate modern multimedia techniques (video, animation, interactive demonstrations).
Innovatively apply sound graphical design and multimedia technologies to persuade tech- and media-savvy audiences.
Adapt your use of persuasive techniques to match the backgrounds of your audiences.
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