Here is something that might be a little uncomfortable to hear. A lot of strong companies submit weak nominations. Not because their work is not genuinely excellent, but because the way they describe their work fails to communicate what makes it excellent in a way that lands with someone who is evaluating it quickly alongside thirty other submissions. This is one of the more consistent patterns I have observed across years of running award programs at Business Intelligence Group, and it is worth understanding if you are even thinking about nominating your company for anything.
The gap between what a company has actually done and what their nomination conveys is almost always about specificity, not about quality. The companies doing the most impressive work are not always the ones writing the most impressive nominations. And the companies that consistently win are the ones who have figured out how to close that gap.
The Difference Between Describing and Demonstrating
The most common mistake in nomination writing is describing what your company did rather than demonstrating it. There is a meaningful difference. Describing sounds like: "Our team implemented a new customer success program that significantly improved client retention." Demonstrating sounds like: "We rebuilt our onboarding process from scratch, reducing time-to-value from 90 days to 34 days, which drove a 22-point increase in 12-month retention among enterprise accounts."
One of those sentences tells a judge something they can actually evaluate. The other one is essentially asking them to take your word for it. Judges are smart, experienced professionals who have seen a lot of vague superlatives. They are not going to be impressed by "significant improvement." They are going to be impressed by a number, a timeline, a before-and-after, a comparison to industry benchmarks.
According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, B2B content that includes specific data points is substantially more credible and memorable to professional audiences than content that relies on qualitative claims alone. The same is absolutely true of nominations. If you cannot put a number on it, a judge is going to wonder if you actually moved the needle at all.
What Judges Are Actually Looking For
Different award programs weight criteria differently, but most serious B2B recognition programs are evaluating some combination of innovation, impact, execution, and scale. Understanding what each of those actually means to an evaluator is genuinely helpful for writing a stronger nomination.
Innovation does not require inventing something new. It means applying something in a meaningfully different way, or combining existing approaches in a combination that produces better results. Judges are perfectly happy to give high scores to companies that took a known technique and implemented it with unusual discipline or creativity. What they are looking for is evidence that you thought carefully about the problem rather than just following the standard playbook.
Impact means measurable results in the context that actually matters to your business. Revenue is obvious, but judges also care about customer outcomes, employee outcomes, operational efficiency, and competitive positioning. The key is that the impact has to be real, specific, and attributable to the initiative you are describing.
The Structure That Actually Works
The nominations that consistently score highest tend to follow a structure that is simple but disciplined. Start with a clear statement of the challenge or opportunity you were addressing. Be specific about what the situation was before you acted. Then describe what you did and why you made the choices you made. Then show the results with actual numbers. Then briefly explain why this matters beyond your own company, to your customers, your industry, or the broader market.
That last part is something a lot of companies skip, and it is actually meaningful. Judges are generally looking for companies whose work has implications beyond their own bottom line. Not because the award is a charity, but because excellence in business almost always produces value that radiates outward, and recognizing that dynamic is part of what makes a nomination feel genuinely substantive rather than just a list of accomplishments.
What Immediately Loses Points
There are a handful of things that reliably reduce scores, and they are all avoidable. Vague language is the biggest one. If you are using words like "industry-leading," "best-in-class," or "transformative" without immediately backing them up with evidence, you are raising a flag rather than making a point. Judges have seen every superlative in the English language, and they are trained to discount them on sight.
Nominations that are clearly written for a general audience rather than a specific evaluator also tend to underperform. You have context that the judge does not have. Use the nomination to close that gap. Do not assume they understand why your market segment is particularly challenging, or why your customer base has unusual requirements, or why the timeline you worked under was especially difficult. Explain it. Briefly, specifically, and with evidence.
The Nominations That Stay With Judges
After evaluating a long session of nominations, there are maybe three or four that a judge tends to remember clearly by the end of the day. The ones that make that cut are almost always the ones that told a story, not just a list of accomplishments. They had a clear arc: here was the situation, here was what we decided to do and why, here is what happened, here is why it matters. That structure is not complicated, but it requires thinking carefully about the narrative you are trying to tell rather than just cataloging your activities.
The good news is that if your company has done genuinely excellent work, the story is already there. The nomination is just the task of finding it and telling it clearly. That is worth the time it takes to get right.