Mind Your Ps and Qs

What’s important when submitting a pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) or tender?  The client, your reader, will want to know that you have the experience, credibility, capacity and genuine desire to deliver their requirements on time and to a high quality.

Remember also that the person who instigated the procurement of the services that you’re hoping to provide will almost certainly not be the only assessor of your submission, if indeed they’re involved at all.  If you’re asked to submit more than one copy, then you know straight away that several people will scrutinise your submission, probably from different viewpoints.  You need to cover all the angles in your answers, while still remaining focused in your responses and, above all, making sure that you do the one thing that many hopeful bidders fail to do: answer the question.

We’re taught at school, college and university that answering the question is the single most important requirement, but something along the way causes us sometimes to forget that and, instead, tell the reader information about which we’d like to write but that doesn’t necessarily add much to the substance of the response.  The best way to turn a reader off is to make him or her work hard to find the actual answer to the question, amongst all the interesting, but not useful, material.

Your responses have to be both interesting and useful.  Granted, it’s pretty difficult to make your address sound interesting, unless you’re based at Curious House on Fancy Street in Glamorous Town, so some answers will simply have to settle for being useful and not particularly interesting.  However, the rest of your document, e-submission or presentation provides your golden opportunity to shine and show your ability not only to provide the services, but also to get to the point.

If you’re asked to explain your corporate sustainability policy, do precisely that.  Your views on sustainability and statements about how seriously you take it can come after you’ve answered the question.  If you’re asked, “Does your organisation have a health and safety management policy?”, there’s actually a one-word answer to that: either “yes” or “no”.  Anything else would be back-up information.  As the description suggests, back-up information appears after the actual answer to the question, to provide…well… back-up.  If presented the other way around, the answer may well appear ‘waffly’, which is a very dangerous situation because it diminishes the impact of your answer.

It’s also important to show consistency in your style of writing.  When presenting case studies, for example, refer either to ‘clients’ or ‘customers’, but not both.  The choice of which one to use should be based on your normal business style.  Some businesses refer to their clients, others their customers.  Remember also that nouns don’t need to begin with upper case letters, unless they’re in reference to specific initiatives or named entities.  For example, “We will work as integral members of the Team…” doesn’t have any greater significance than, “We will work as integral members of the team…”  There are very many such points for which to look out when writing documents, but we can cover others in future articles.  We’ll also look at presentation style, and more about writing with impact, another time.