Liverpool John Moores University
Emphasis helped the health and social sciences faculty at Liverpool John Moores University to write high-impact tenders – and win more business.
The problem
The faculty was keen for its staff to bring in more third-stream income – largely through public-sector contracts in training, research and development. The ten teams across the faculty engaged in this commercial work were highly skilled in academic report writing but didn’t know how to write effective tenders and bids. Business Development Manager Chris Edwards asked Emphasis to help address this skills gap.
Emphasis solution
Emphasis designed a business-writing programme that showed faculty members how to write attention-grabbing executive summaries, structure a persuasive argument and tailor bids to the needs of the reader. It also examined how to create a peg on which to hang their sales messages.
Another key focus was readability: encouraging staff to move away from overuse of the passive, academic voice and instead engage the reader by using the active voice.
The benefits: what the attendees said
- “It was very useful to have thinking space for the day,” says Chris. “Learning the Four Ps technique was an eye-opener. It turned on its head the way we used to approach writing an executive summary. Having this new structure is invaluable. We used to summarise everything we thought was key to winning the bid, but now we make sure to focus on the reader and set the scene and situation.”
- “Having an individual writing style assessment was very useful,” says Nick Medforth, Enterprise and Collaborative Partnerships Manager at the university. “I learnt just how important it was to write for your audience and focus on what they’ve asked for.”
- “It was an excellent training session because although people came from different academic backgrounds, everyone got something out of the training,” adds Chris. “I have found Emphasis to be superb. Everything was excellent, from the emails afterwards to the bookmarks you sent to remind us of the main principles. The trainer was also absolutely brilliant. It was all handled fantastically.”
The lasting effects
The team is now rising to the challenge of regularly using the high-impact writing skills they’ve learnt, ensuring their business documents are concise and customer-focused.
“We have been more successful in our business goals since the training. And we have won a handful or so of recent bids,” says Chris. There has also been a marked difference in the quality of the tenders. “We have put in better bids as a result. For every bid we’ve made, we have had excellent feedback.”