Securing contracts within the UK public sector demands more than a mere list of services and products. It needs a clear, compelling narrative aligning your solutions with the buyer’s objectives. Storyboarding, a critical but often overlooked tool, not only plans but also enhances your proposal’s ability to communicate effectively.
What is storyboarding?
At its core, storyboarding is a visual strategy employed across various creative domains, including film and advertising, to visualise narratives and sequences. In the context of bid proposals, storyboarding helps in organising thoughts, presenting ideas clearly, and ensuring that your proposal tells a compelling story that aligns with the buyer’s needs and goals. Consider your storyboard as the blueprint of your proposal. It should chart your bid’s journey in detail, highlighting every critical point and advantage of your solution and ensuring alignment with the buyer’s criteria.
Why use a storyboarding approach?
Storyboarding your bid is like having a roadmap for a long journey. It acts as your GPS, guiding you step-by-step through the buyer’s requirements and keeping you on track. Without it, you’ll be driving blindly, making random turns, and getting lost along the way. You might end up taking detours that waste time and effort describing capabilities they don’t care about. Or you could completely miss vital requirements, like arriving at your destination without the keys.
The storyboard ensures you cover all the essential elements in a logical sequence that flows from the buyer’s current challenges to how your proposed solution will improve things. Whilst keeping you on track, the method also applies clever marketing and storytelling techniques, enhancing its persuasiveness.
How do I start storyboarding bids?
Study the requirements carefully
Your starting point should always be a thorough analysis of the tender documents. Carefully analyse the documents to pinpoint the core problems that need solving, the desired outcomes, and any specific themes or priorities the buyer emphasises. Your storyboard narrative needs to directly address these points.
Use the Q&A process
During the tender process, there are opportunities to ask clarification questions. Use this process to fill in any gaps in your understanding of their requirements to inform and refine your storyboards.
Focus on the user journey
Your proposal should not only highlight the benefits of your solution but also narrate the journey of the end-user. Centre your storyboard around how your solution will impact the user, bringing the narrative to life with specific scenarios and examples.
Resources to help you with bid storyboarding
Miro offers a versatile storyboard template that can be used to visualise customer journeys, map out product development stages, or plan marketing campaigns. The platform allows for collaborative work, making it easy for teams to contribute and refine storyboards in real-time. This tool is particularly useful for understanding and empathising with user experiences, identifying customer journey gaps, and aligning team efforts.
By storyboarding your proposed solution with the buyer’s perspective in mind, you can clearly differentiate your offering and highlight its suitability. By visualising your ideas, you not only improve internal communication and proposal planning, but also make a stronger impression on public sector buyers.
