There is a reason that companies doing genuinely excellent work sometimes do not win the awards they nominate for, while companies doing slightly less impressive work do win. It is almost never about who actually did the better job. It is almost always about who told the story of their work more effectively to someone who had about eight minutes to evaluate it alongside thirty other submissions.
Writing a nomination that judges actually want to read, and score highly, is a specific skill. It is learnable. And once you understand the mechanics, you will find that you have been making the same avoidable mistakes every time. Here is how to stop making them.
Start With the Problem, Not the Solution
The most common structural mistake in nomination writing is leading with what the company did rather than with the context that makes what they did meaningful. A judge reading your nomination needs to understand what you were up against before they can appreciate what you accomplished. Skipping straight to the solution is like starting a story at the climax. It makes it hard to feel the stakes.
A strong nomination opens with a clear, specific description of the situation before your initiative: what the challenge was, why it mattered, what was at risk, what the baseline looked like. One or two paragraphs is enough. But those paragraphs do a lot of work. They give the judge a foundation for evaluating everything that follows, and they signal immediately that you are someone who understands your own context clearly rather than someone who is just listing accomplishments.
Numbers Are Not Optional
According to analysis from the Content Marketing Institute, B2B content that includes specific quantitative claims is significantly more credible and memorable to professional audiences than content that relies on qualitative descriptions alone. The same is emphatically true of award nominations. If you cannot put a number on your results, you are asking the judge to take your word for it. And judges are specifically trained not to do that.
The numbers do not have to be dramatic. A 12% improvement in a meaningful metric is more credible than significant improvement. A reduction from 60 days to 38 days is more persuasive than meaningfully faster. A customer retention rate that went from 78% to 86% tells a real story. Improved customer retention does not. Before you write your first sentence, spend 20 minutes identifying every number that is relevant to the story you are telling. That list of numbers is the spine of your nomination.
The Difference Between What You Did and Why You Did It
Nominations that score in the top tier almost always include a clear explanation of the thinking behind the choices that were made, not just a description of the choices themselves. Judges are evaluating more than outcomes. They are evaluating judgment. And judgment is only visible if you show your reasoning.
Why did you choose this approach rather than the more conventional one? What alternatives did you consider and reject? What made you confident that your approach would work? What did you learn during implementation that changed how you were thinking about the problem? These are not complicated questions, but answering them specifically and honestly transforms a list of actions into evidence of genuine expertise. That is what separates the nominations that stay with judges after a long evaluation day from the ones that blur into each other.
The Mistakes That Reliably Cost Points
There are a handful of things that show up constantly in nominations that lose, and they are all easily avoidable. Superlatives without evidence are the biggest one. Industry-leading, best-in-class, transformative, and groundbreaking are phrases that judges have been trained to discount on sight. They mean nothing without specific evidence, and using them signals that the nominator may not have specific evidence to offer.
The second most common mistake is writing for a general audience rather than for a knowledgeable evaluator. You have context that the judge does not have. Use the nomination to close that gap specifically. If your market segment has unusual characteristics that made your achievement more difficult, say so explicitly. If your results are particularly strong relative to industry benchmarks, cite the benchmarks. If your timeline was constrained in ways that made what you accomplished more impressive, explain the constraint. The judge is not going to infer the difficulty of your situation. You have to tell them.
The Ending That Makes the Difference
The final section of a strong nomination answers a question that a lot of nominators do not think to address: so what? Not just for your company, but for your customers, your industry, or the broader market. Why does it matter that you accomplished what you accomplished beyond the fact that it is good for your bottom line? What does it enable or change? What would be different if this work had not been done?
That outward-facing framing is what takes a nomination from impressive company doing good work to important contribution to the field. Judges are looking for both, and the ones that have both score higher across the board. The ending takes ten minutes to write if you have thought through the rest of the nomination carefully. It is ten minutes that almost always pays off.