Typo mistakes in contract2/20/2024 ![]() How is it possible for a proposal littered with mistakes to not only be the best proposal I critiqued, but also win a $31M contract?īecause the message was so compelling that the proposal evaluators would have been insane not to shortlist them! More on this later. ![]() Not only was it littered with mistakes, the mistakes were in very unfortunate places (like the first page of the cover letter and pull out boxes in resumes).Īnd guess what…out of all the proposals I critiqued, this proposal was, by far, THE BEST. But with one, I just had to say something in my critique. During my critiques, I rarely commented on errors. Nobody CaresĪs you know, I’ve been doing brutally honest proposal critiques over the last few months. And you certainly can’t read it AND scour it for errors. What we fail to realize is we’ll give our clients 200-page documents and we’re lucky if they spend even ten minutes reading them. We were trained in the critical nature of correct English. In addition, many marketers (including me) had English minors or majors in college. They’ve been taught that details matter and clients won’t hire you if you are missing a comma. And just like every book I’ve read (or written) and every proposal I’ve seen, every issue of the New York Times has mistakes.Īrchitects and engineers think spelling, grammar, and usage are important. I’m saying your proposal doesn’t have to compare to the editorial standards of the New York Times. Listen, I’m not saying you should submit proposals written with crayons by a bunch of toddlers. And here, I’m slaving away trying to find every single error and then debating with my team whether to use a comma or semicolon in the sentence. Our competitors were beating us with proposals that were filled with embarrassing errors. And guess what the ones that beat us had in common. Let me explain.Īround this time, I started getting my hands on competitor’s proposal. Why? Because I was spending all this time on something that didn’t matter. Over the next 5 years, we spent countless hours combing for, finding, and correcting mistakes in our proposals. When I first interviewed for my job, the Director of Marketing at the time told me one of her biggest frustrations was mistakes in proposals.
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