Reading through the awards, I could tell within a sentence. Adjective-heavy, generic, technically correct and well written. I’d get to the end of a question and think I still don’t know what you do. I wasn’t marking anyone on their English writing ability. I was marking them on what they’d achieved, and half of them left me scratching my head because what they’d ‘written’ could have been about any business in any industry.

Stop marketing yourself. Awards need to build a case

I’ve reframed how I think about this over the years, and it changed everything about how I write. I’m not a copywriter selling a business. I’m a lawyer, standing in front of a judge, and I want my client found guilty of success.

That’s not a metaphor I’m using for effect. It’s genuinely how I handle every question. A lawyer doesn’t tell the jury their client is a good person. They build a case. Evidence, testimony, timelines, facts and proof. I want the judges to get to the end of an entry and not be scratching their heads, thinking ‘huh?’. They know exactly what happened and why.

An award entry needs to do the same thing. Not ‘we provide exceptional customer service’. That’s not a case, it’s a slogan. What’s the repeat rate? The referral rate? The review score? Where are the case studies? The testimonials? The data to back it up. Show it, don’t tell.

Judges are people, not a rubric

Most awards have a scoring process behind it. But when you get down to it, the judges reading your entry are human beings with the same unconscious bias and soft spots as anyone else. A rubric doesn’t cry at a good story. A person does.

That doesn’t mean manufacturing emotion. It means answering honestly when a question asks why you do what you do, telling it in your voice, with language and words you would use. Not the version ChatGPT would give you if you fed it a prompt. Why do you get up and do this every day? Judges can tell the difference between a written answer and a felt one, even when both are grammatically perfect.

The eight things I ask every client for before we write awards

Before any writing starts, I want proof under eight headings: who’s on the team and why they matter, what you’ve done to develop yourself in the last year or two, the real reason the business exists, the gap you saw in the market, your actual numbers, what your marketing is producing, where you’ve shown up publicly, and what you’ve changed or improved behind the scenes.

Skip that step and the writing stalls halfway through every question, because there’s nothing to say.

Take profit. Judges aren’t hunting for a big number. They’re checking whether you know your own numbers, good or bad. I wrote an entry recently for a client whose profit actually fell that year, because for the first time she paid herself a proper wage and invested heavily in her team. She didn’t want to talk about it. I told her the judges want that story more than a clean growth chart. It’s not all sunshine in business, and pretending otherwise reads as thin.

Awards need proof. That beats a title every time

Take Joanne. She’d been writing her own entries with no luck. Always the bridesmaid. Never the bride. She came to me for a five-award package. I pushed through the process and her deflections to get to the heart of her story and the proof to back it up. When I asked her about her customer service, she told me that it’s an important part of what she does … and then moved on. Woah, let’s go back and dig deeper. I found out more about how she onboards people, the way she goes above and beyond and got her to share some client stories. I used those to answer the question. She won three and was a finalist in all five. Then I showed her how to use her wins to drop perception building breadcrumbs. Not just to get a pat on the back from her followers but to build the proof that she is good at what she does. It brought her five new clients worth another $60,000.

Or the business who wanted to win employer of the year. I asked them about career pathways and training. They shared a story about Kerry, who started on the factory floor packing boxes. Within six months it was obvious she was switched on, asking questions no one else asked. The business paid for her to do a forklift course. That’s a staff development answer. It doesn’t need a policy document behind it; it needs one true story.

Or the coach I wrote for last year. Coaches are everywhere, so on paper there was nothing to distinguish her. Except she had a genuinely narrow niche: helping women charge what they’re worth. We built the case around one client who went from earning $80,000 to $2 million a year because of the work they did together, then traced the ripple effect out from there. She won.

None of these needed clever language or flowery adjectives. They needed specifics, facts, examples and evidence.

The word that gives AI away every time

If you’re using ChatGPT or Claude to help write your entry, fine, I’m not precious about it. But read it back out loud afterwards. If you wouldn’t say it, cut it.

Words like credibility, thought leadership, innovation, ecosystem: they’re filler. When you catch yourself writing ‘we’ve built an ecosystem,’ stop and say what you built instead. What it does. What came of it. AI can’t do that unless you feed it your real data first, because it doesn’t know your numbers. Only you do.

Three mistakes I see every single awards season

Leaving it to the last minute. Awards extend their deadlines constantly because people wait until the final week. You’ve usually known about it for a month.

Not entering at all. The people who never enter will never win. The people who keep entering eventually will. It’s like building a callus. The first few attempts sting a bit. Then it stops being a big deal.

Keeping a finalist placement quiet. Secrets don’t sell. If you make the finals, tell people, even before the result’s announced. Every mention is another chance for someone to notice you, remember you, and think of you when they’re ready to buy. That’s not showing off. That’s just how people come to trust a name over time.

The people who don’t enter will never win. The people who keep entering and don’t let not winning stop them, they’ll win eventually.