Creating Credibility with Details

Another common weakness in proposals, one that undercuts your credibility, is the use of unsubstantiated claims. Marketing "fluff" is not convincing. The more specifically you can substantiate your value statements and differentiators, the more likely the customer is to believe them.

Here are some examples of marketing fluff you should avoid:

• Best-of-breed

• Leading edge

• Leveraged

• Market/industry leader

• State-of-the-art

• Unequaled

• Uniquely qualified

• World-class

If your proposal says that you "leverage world-class service and best-of-breed products into the industry leading solution" and that you are "uniquely qualified" to handle this project, your customers will probably just mutter to themselves, "Oh, please, not again ..." and start skimming for something substantive.

Challenge the clich s of proposal writing. Force yourself to be concrete when you make your claims. For example, here are some typical statements that appeared in actual proposals along with suggested rewrites that make them more credible and persuasive by making them more specific:

Our servers are the most reliable in the industry	Our servers have an average mean time between failures of 1800 hours, the best in the industry.
Our installation team is composed of up to four qualified engineers who record their efforts in an Operation Log	The installation team assigned to your project will consist of state-licensed engineers. Each completed step in the process of installing your repair depot will be documented in the Operation Log to assure compliance with your requirements and to provide a simple tool to transition ownership of the project to your own staff.
We are anxious to work with the Tax Collection Board in establishing an Internet-based tax collection system, as evidenced by our efforts over the past ten years and by our substantial financial investment in developing a prototype of the proposed system	We are eager to work with the Tax Collection Board as you improve tax payment compliance by putting tax collection on the Internet. For more than ten years we have worked with you successfully on projects that have improved the information management and technology infrastructure of the Board, most notably the Small Business Revenue Initiative in 1997 and the Taxpayer Information Portal in 2000. In addition, we have invested $13,500,000 of our own funds in developing the prototype of the Internet-based tax collection system we are recommending in this proposal. This investment will assure speedy delivery of a working system and will reduce the Board's capital expenditures for system development.

As you can see, specificity in the details increases the persuasiveness of the message.