Winning a Website Renewal Through Competitive Pitch

The Competitive Pitch

I landed a website renewal project through a competitive pitch.

Smaller projects usually come through referrals, but bigger ones require a formal pitch process. Multiple vendors submit proposals, present their plans, and one gets selected.

Honestly, these competitive pitches are exhausting. I’m confident in my coding, but writing proposals, creating presentation decks, and presenting — that’s an entirely different skill set.

Proposals Are Harder Than Code

Every time I write a proposal, I’m reminded: this is harder than coding.

Code just needs to work. If the logic is right, you get results. But a proposal needs to persuade — explain why things should be done a certain way. The same feature gets completely different evaluations depending on how it’s framed.

As a developer, I want to present the technically optimal solution. But what clients want isn’t technical excellence — it’s “a site that helps our business.” Bridging that gap is always the hard part.

What I Did Differently This Time

I’ve lost competitive pitches before. Last time, I focused on technical specs. Didn’t get selected.

This time, I changed my approach:

Minimized technical talk, focused on business outcomes
Emphasized “what business value does this feature deliver”
Included competitor site analysis (this landed particularly well)
Presented projected post-renewal improvements with numbers

When developers do planning, we tend to fixate on “how will we build this.” But for clients, “what improves after it’s built” matters more. This pitch really drove that lesson home.

After Winning

Feels good to win the project, but now the real work begins.

Everything I proposed in the pitch needs to actually get built. Looking back at the proposal, some parts feel like… I might have oversold a bit. But promises were made.

When a developer handles planning, design, development, and maintenance solo, time management is everything. If I deliver this project well, it’s another one for the portfolio. Time to buckle down.

Though I can’t help thinking — if I’d spent the proposal-writing time coding instead, I’d probably be halfway done already.