EP083: How to Be Concise in an RFP Response – with Samantha Enslen
More and more, RFPs specifically ask for concise responses. But how do you decide what to include and what to leave out?
Samantha Enslen is the Founder and President of Dragonfly Editorial, an award-winning creative agency known for explaining complex topics clearly, whether the team is writing proposals, marketing communication or thought leadership pieces. Samantha is sought-after in the proposal world for her expertise in content strategy and writing, and she was recently named a 2020 APMP Fellow.
On this episode of the podcast, Samantha joins us to explain how to balance being concise with providing enough information in the RFP response.
She shares her top strategies for guiding technical experts to write more concisely, discussing why it’s helpful to pair SMEs with proposal writers or editors.
Listen in for Samantha’s insight on attracting and keeping the attention of skimmers and get her top tips for deciding what details are relevant—and which ones to phase out.
Key Takeaways
Samantha’s introduction to proposals at a temp agency in DC
How Dragonfly helps clients with RFP responses as well as marketing and communications writing
How to balance being concise with providing enough information
Samantha’s advice on answering the questions up front in a sound bite that’s easy to find
The 2 questions Samantha asks to decide what details to add
1. Does this highlight our differentiators?
2. Does this explain how we add value to the client?
How Samantha guides SMEs to write more concisely
Why it’s helpful to pair an SME with a proposal writer or editor
Samantha’s recommendations for attracting and keeping the attention of skimmers
1. Include the most important info first
2. Break the content into easily digestible chunks
3. Give each chunk a meaningful subhead
4. Set critical info in bulleted lists
How Samantha uses sidebars for details and supplementary info
Why callout boxes should ONLY be used for high-value information
The value in highlighting client testimonials in callout boxes or sidebars
RFP Success Show EP83 Transcription
You're listening to the RFP Success Show with eight time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capturing RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20, 30 and even 50% and meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:24):
Hello everybody. And welcome to the RFP Success Show. I am Lisa Rehurek your host and I am founder and CEO of the RFP Success Company. And I'm excited today, I'm interviewing Samantha Enslen and I love talking to Samantha because she is all things writing. She is president of Dragonfly Editorial, and she's also an APMP fellow. Very, very well known in the proposal industry for her expertise in content strategy and writing. So welcome, Samantha.
Samantha Enslen (00:53):
Welcome Lisa. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Lisa Rehurek (00:56):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, why don't we kick this off with having you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this crazy proposal world?
Samantha Enslen (01:04):
Sure. Oh my gosh. Well, I'm originally from Ohio, but I lived out in the DC area for about 15 years after college. And so that's when I wound up falling into the proposal world. I knew at a certain point in my career, I wanted to be an editor and the DC area is one of those places where they actually have temp agencies for creatives. So I got signed up with a temp agency as an editor, believe it or not, and was placed at Computer Sciences Corporation in their proposal shop. And I started working for them.... I worked the 2:00-10:00 PM shift or the 3:00-11:00 PM shift.
Lisa Rehurek (01:44):
Wow.
Samantha Enslen (01:46):
Editing all the proposal that were getting turned around the clock, and wound up working there full time and being there for about seven years and helping them develop the writing and editing function within their proposal group. And then about 15 years ago, came back to Ohio to be close to my family and started Dragonfly editorial.
Lisa Rehurek (02:07):
Wow.
Samantha Enslen (02:08):
And we've been doing proposal work for... I continued working for CSC when we came back here, so that was a great relationship. And we work with them to this day, although they have a different name. Now they're DXC. They merged with a division of HP. We've worked with tons of government contractors and folks who do commercial proposals and we expanded over the years, so we also do a ton of marketing and communications writing as well. So we sort of work on the whole sales spectrum proposals on one side. And then on the other side, we help people write things like white papers, case studies, fact sheets, their web copy, blogs, you name it. So it's kind of unique to work on both sides of the house like that, but I love it. We get to see such a variety of work.
Lisa Rehurek (03:01):
Well, I was just going to say that. That's kind of the fun thing about working on both sides, right? You see that variety and I would guess that you learn from yourself on both sides of the aisle there, right? Is that a true statement?
Samantha Enslen (03:13):
You definitely do. And one of the things that we've learned also over time is that we have people who can bridge and work in both of those worlds. We also have people who like never the Twain shall meet. So we have people who are really good at proposals and really love digging into the technical side of things. And then we have people who would like die if they had to do that every day, but who loved working on the marketing communications, which can be just as technical in their own way. But it's a whole different world than the proposal grind as it were.
Lisa Rehurek (03:49):
Interesting. Well, it was kind of funny because I was recording a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it was all about conciseness and I thought, "Hmm, I really want to have this conversation with somebody else. Samantha is my girl." So I want to dig in and talk about conciseness of proposals because it's a battle that I feel like we're always having with our clients. Always the technical people have a hard time grasping the concept of conciseness. And so I want to talk to you about that a little bit. How do you balance being concise with also providing enough information?
Samantha Enslen (04:30):
I think that's a great question, Lisa, and it's a difficult question and it's a perpetual question. I hear that all the time from people. There is a balance, and I think what we have to be led with is asking what's relevant to our readers. I'll divert one second and say that there's a new ISO standard being developed on plain language. I don't know if you've heard about that.
Lisa Rehurek (04:57):
I have not.
Samantha Enslen (04:58):
And it's not out yet. It should be out in 2021, but I was lucky enough to be one of the reviewers for the standards and so I got a sneak peek at them and literally the first guideline in this new ISO standard is write about what's relevant to the reader. So in our proposals, what's relevant to them is what's going to help them answer their question and evaluate our proposal, whatever content we provide, we need to provide that in a quick soundbite, as it were, for them in a place that's easy to find. They can quickly and easily get their answer. And then after that, if we want, we can provide some detail. We want to make sure we answer the question immediately upfront in a concise, easy to find, easy to read way. I'm not really answering your question about how much additional detail we should include. That's kind of like asking how angels can dance on the head of a pan or what have you... It's a mysterious question that we never shall know the answer to.
Lisa Rehurek (06:03):
The elusive question. No, I agree with you. I think too, that one of the things that we try to tell our folks as well is, answer the question that they've asked. Just answer that question because that's what they have to evaluate you on.
Samantha Enslen (06:17):
Yeah.
Lisa Rehurek (06:17):
And unless it's a value add or something that differentiates you, leave it out or you could maybe, like you said, add a little bit more detail there, but then that's when you get into that, "Okay. How many more pages of detail are you giving?" It's just going to confuse them to be able to give you the score. So I think you answered the question exactly like I would have answered it.
Samantha Enslen (06:42):
Well, thank you. But what you said, I think is really important when you're deciding how much detail to include you can ask, is this extra detail highlighting a difference? Is this extra detail explaining how it will add value to the client? If the answer isn't yes to both of those, and we're just kind of providing a lot of like, Oh, here's a bunch of other information about how we do this. Maybe we don't include that.
Lisa Rehurek (07:08):
Yeah. Because I find, and tell me if you find the same thing. One of the things that I find is that especially technical folks really struggle to say, but, "But we can do this too," or "we should do this too." And that's all good and well, but that's their job after you get the contract, like get the contract, get your feet in the door, and if it's additional scope, additional upsell, you can do that when you're in there. But in the proposal, leave it out.
Samantha Enslen (07:36):
Yeah, I have to agree.
Lisa Rehurek (07:38):
So this is probably going to be the same question, but I just want to see if there's a different answer to it. How do you guide your technical folks to write more concisely? Because that's really where the problem comes in, right. And not to be bashing technical folks by any means because you know, they want to make sure it's covered. And technical folks tend to be very thorough. But how can we better guide them as maybe a proposal managers to say, "Hey, we got to keep this shorter. Here's what we want to do."
Samantha Enslen (08:09):
I think there's a couple ways to approach that. One is what we just talked about, guide them to first answer the question. Yes, no. And here's how we will do it. I think that we should guide them to really think about what are the critical components of the offering that people need to know about. What are the critical values we would bring and highlight those. Well, let me step back a second, Lisa, because one thing that I don't like to do is give authors too much guidance about, "do this. Don't do this, include this, don't include this" upfront. Upfront, I want them to just gather all the information they have and kind of like dump it down, write as quickly as they can get everything on paper and then go back and try to edit that down or pare that down later.
Samantha Enslen (09:02):
In other words, I don't want to give them too much direction up front and essentially give them writer's block because they're stressing about all these different things.
Lisa Rehurek (09:09):
Great point.
Samantha Enslen (09:10):
So I'm kind of fine if they use the, let me dump everything in at first approach, but then really go back and pare it down to what's the essential information. What are the things, like you said, that are going to be differentiators for us are going to set us apart, are going to add special value for the customer.
Lisa Rehurek (09:31):
Yeah, I think that's a really great point to not block out the flow for those technical writers. And one of the things I heard somewhere, and I might've heard it from you is that technical writers are not trained to be persuasive writers. And you're probably never going to get them to be as concise as we want or as persuasive and that's why you maybe have a second layer of writers that come in to really take their information and pare it down. Do you find that helpful also if there's another layer of people in there to help smooth that writing over?
Samantha Enslen (10:03):
Oh, definitely. It depends on how the proposal is structured. Sometimes a subject matter expert will be doing the first pass of gathering all the content and then we'll have a proposal writer, editor person come in after them and help to pare it down, make it stronger and more persuasive, do all the details of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so forth. And I think that can help a lot to pair a subject matter expert with a proposal writer.
Lisa Rehurek (10:34):
And that's how you all work, right? With people that-
Samantha Enslen (10:37):
That's generally how we work and we don't have... Because we're an outsource group, we don't generally have subject matter experts on our team. We usually are pairing a writer with a subject matter expert to work together, to create a strong section.
Lisa Rehurek (10:52):
Perfect. Perfect. I love that.
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Lisa Rehurek (11:19):
Yeah, it's interesting. We've had a kind of this rash of proposals recently that are just super long and there was one in particular that the RFP said concise, at least five times in the instructions. And when I see that I'm like, "Oh, they're tired of reading these big, long proposals." You know, they want more readable. So the topic of conciseness, as you know, it just always comes up, but I definitely wanted to broach that with you. So thank you.
Samantha Enslen (11:48):
Yeah. How did you handle that on those proposals, Lisa? Were you able to convince your teams to write more concisely?
Lisa Rehurek (11:57):
Yep. So we, on a couple of them, we come in and help with that. And that's part of what we do is help pare it down and help if it's in the draft phase. We did one in particular, that was a review and where we're just coming in and we're giving them advice. We're doing a consulting review on it. And poor guys, I felt so bad because I said, "I think you guys need to cut this by like a hundred pages." And I thought they were going to have a heart attack, but because it was in draft phase and they didn't have that long to... They had, I think about 10 days I think is what they had.
Lisa Rehurek (12:28):
So that one was a little bit rough, but the other ones where we're in there, we can certainly help that. I'm pretty good at paring stuff down. As a matter of fact, [Sherry 00:12:36], one of my employees is always like, "Okay, Lisa, I can't get this down to the two pages that is required. Can you do it?" And because I've learned so much from you, I'm great at now being able to pair some of that down and we're going to talk a little bit about some of that readability stuff here in a little bit, so.
Samantha Enslen (12:53):
Yeah. And conciseness does dovetail with readability and we can talk about that later. One thing I think that you can do to cut down your text a lot too, is just cutting out a lot of the fluffy or unnecessarily wordy language that is surrounding all the technical content. Often there is critical technical content that you can't delete.
Lisa Rehurek (13:17):
Right.
Samantha Enslen (13:17):
Or there's really no way to make it shorter. But when the subject matter is complex, it's even more important that all the writing around it, it's really simple and clean and not cluttering up the works even more.
Lisa Rehurek (13:32):
Yep. I agree. I agree. Especially because our evaluators are probably not going to be technical, right? So we've got to make it more simple for them. You might have one on the team that is pretty savvy, but probably not going to be all of them.
Samantha Enslen (13:46):
Yeah. That's a great point too.
Lisa Rehurek (13:48):
One of the things that we recommend a lot of times is to be thinking about the different reader styles. And we're always saying, "Look, you've got a big majority of the world that are skimmers, right. They don't want to read word for word." So how do you recommend people handle or provide something in the proposal to attract and keep the attention of the skimmers?
Samantha Enslen (14:11):
Sure. Well, first of all, I think that's a accurate assessment that probably most of our evaluators are going to be skimmers. They're not going to take the proposal and like sit by the fire with a cup of cocoa and put their feedback and read it word for word, they're going to be skimming to find the information they need, to score and evaluate as quickly as possible and get out. That's what you or I would do from that situation.
Lisa Rehurek (14:41):
For sure.
Samantha Enslen (14:42):
We're not reading this stuff for fun.
Lisa Rehurek (14:44):
And we're reading multiple of them, they're reading multiple of them. Right? Gross.
Samantha Enslen (14:50):
Exactly. Yeah. So a lot of the principles of plain language and readability dovetail with this exact question. So what we want to do is create texts that is truly scannable for our readers. So that starts with, in any section putting the most important information, first communicating our value proposition in our headline, in what I'll call the deck, which is like a paragraph right under that first headline, that kind of gives you the summary of here's what this section is about, here's what it's going to say. That's like a term from journalism, a deck. The content that follows, we want to break it into easily digestible chunks. So say whatever you have, two to five pages of content think about, okay, maybe there's a five discreet ideas in that two pages of content. So I'm going to kind of have that broken into five different chunks.
Samantha Enslen (15:46):
So we figured out how we're going to chunk out that content. We're going to give each of those pieces of content, a meaningful subhead. So a subhead that tells the reader what's in that section and also communicates our value, if we can. Sometimes if you're doing something that's like a federal government proposal where the subheads are dictated by the RFP, you don't have as much room in that to do that, but with a commercial proposal or something that gives you more flexibility, you can communicate a lot of meaning in those subheads.
Samantha Enslen (16:20):
The power of the subheads is that truly does allow the reader to scan through a page and find the information they need. And then dive into that section that they do want to go into more deeply. Another thing that we can do is to set critical information in bulleted lists. Again, that allows people to scan, and a lot of times on those bulleted lists, we can have a bold face header or a bold face lead in texts there again. So they can now there's being able to scan through that bulleted list and see the information they want.
Lisa Rehurek (16:56):
That's so great. First of all, I'm going to steal, I'm going to borrow the term deck. Because I always tell people like little mini executive summaries, but it's a mouthful, right? I just don't want to use this journalistic term and make myself look like a [inaudible 00:17:10].
Samantha Enslen (17:09):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a little mini executive summary for the section.
Lisa Rehurek (17:13):
But I really love the use of bold because again, that eye catching. And if we think about a magazine, for example, which feels like a far stretch, but it's not really, if you're walking down the grocery store aisle and those headlines catch your attention just out of the corner of your eye, that's almost what we're talking about. We probably don't want to put Cosmo type headlines in there. Something that gets their attention from the verbiage, but also that bold will stand out a little bit or maybe a different color. Do you do that as well?
Samantha Enslen (17:43):
Oh yeah, absolutely. For proposals that we are able to do that. Yeah. We'll absolutely use for the subheads. Important information that you want to highlight, needless to say, you can also put in a sidebar aside. Sidebars are good for a couple of things. They're good for both.
Samantha Enslen (18:01):
Oh sorry, you guys, all our listeners can probably hear the train that's in our neighborhood going by right now.
Lisa Rehurek (18:07):
Hey, the reality of our world these days, right?
Samantha Enslen (18:09):
Exactly. You can put key information in a sidebar on the side or supplemental information. This is another way to handle detail, sometimes. Maybe you don't really want to shovel that into the narrative, but you can add details or supplementary information in a sidebar. That's like, oh, here's some other information you might want to have.
Lisa Rehurek (18:30):
Oh, I love that idea. And that brings me to the question about call-out boxes. Cause call-out boxes were like a big pet peeve of mine because they always have information that nobody cares about. Like we were founded in 1947 and blah, blah, blah. Nobody cares. They might care at one little point in the RFP, they've asked you for your history, but they don't care in a call-out. So what are some rules of thumb for a call-out?
Samantha Enslen (18:54):
That's a great question. I think the call out box should have high value information that is part of your sales, your sales message or differentiators. Key pieces of information that the customer is looking for because they're either eye is going to be drawn to that. When you're looking at a page for the first time, this is what we see.... It's particularly a call-out box that's set in the upper right-hand corner of a page. We know this from eye-tracking studies of how people look at content on the web, they'll start to look down and then they go up to the right to see what's up there. So having high value information there, not company owner, Samantha Enslen founded in 2005, you know, that kind of stuff. Nobody cares.
Lisa Rehurek (19:41):
Nobody cares, yeah. And it starts to bore them, right? And if we bore them, I mean, I don't know if there's statistics about this, but I always said if we bore them, I'm not going to keep reading if you bore me.
Samantha Enslen (19:52):
Yeah.
Lisa Rehurek (19:53):
Even if they have to, I'll be doing my grocery list in my head.
Samantha Enslen (20:00):
For our own proposals that we send out, I love putting client testimonials in call-out boxes and sidebars. First of all, because they're often written in a livelier way.
Lisa Rehurek (20:12):
Yes.
Samantha Enslen (20:13):
Or a real way. So it's a way to bring some, a human touch to our proposal. So I really like to highlight those in those call-out boxes or sidebars.
Lisa Rehurek (20:25):
I think that's a fantastic idea. I love to do that too. As a matter of fact, we just worked on a proposal not too long ago where we actually got, because of the nature of the proposal and the fact that it was important that they had a certain level of staff and that staffing was competitive, we had staff testimonials in the call-out boxes at which we'd never done staff testimonials before, but it showed that again, nature of the company probably wouldn't do them in all proposals. But yeah, I like that idea. Very fun.
Lisa Rehurek (20:56):
So this is a lot of really great information. I love talking to Sam because I always learn a ton. This is actually part one of two. So we're going to come back in two weeks and she's going to come back and share even more brilliance with you. So Samantha, thank you for all the great information you're sharing with us. We'll talk to you here in a couple of weeks. We're going to break here and come back with the next episode. You have been listening to the RFP Success Show where we bring you tips strategies for up-leveling your RFP responses. And do you want to know the true cost of losing an RFP? Check out our ROI calculator on our rfproi.com. And thanks for listening.
Samantha Enslen (21:33):
Thanks everybody. Bye.
This has been another episode of the RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@rfpsuccess.com. No matter your business size, industry. If you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20 and even 50%. Learn more at therfpsuccesscompany.com.