A strong business proposal is a top opportunity to win new business. It is the ultimate sales document, a condensed version of all the value your solution brings to a client’s problem.
Yet, not every proposal puts your business’s best foot forward. There are a lot of aspects to consider. From the audience to the content to the formatting, each part of a winning business proposal requires thoughtful planning and development.
While it can seem daunting, we will outline the key stages, styles, and content of a winning proposal. There are also a number of helpful tools and tactics that will improve your bid and sales strategy. Incorporating these concepts will produce stronger, more appealing business proposals.
In order to provide a productive guide to a business proposal, we need to clarify to which document we’re referring.
A business proposal is a written offer of services tailored to a client.
Perhaps not every definition uses the word ‘tailored’. However, as it is a crucial characteristic of a successful proposal, it is a key word for our definition.
A proposal is not a business plan. Business plans present a company’s operational and financial objectives. While it’s an important corporate document, it is very different than a proposal. Confounding the two will produce either a poor business proposal or a poor business plan.
A business proposal is created for a specific request or opportunity. It is not prepared as a cold call to a client. There is always an indication provided by the client as to the business needs. This indication may come as large as a public governmental Request for Proposals (RFP) or as small as an email follow-up to an encouraging conversation at a networking meeting.
The reason that a proposal cannot arrive as a cold call is because it must be tailored the client’s needs. The document will clarify how your services can best resolve the client’s problems.
If you do not know the client’s problem, you cannot propose a solution.
The preparation phase will make or break your proposal. It ensures
that the document doesn’t just say who you are, but identifies why you are the
best choice to serve the client.
The proposal audience is the most crucial factor to get right when preparing the proposal. The writer must understand the reader on the other side of the document.
Consider these questions:
· What is their role?
· Who is the decision maker?
· What are their main concerns?
· What supports or resources do they already have?
· Which solution would provide the best value?
· What is their industry background?
A common mistake is to write a generic proposal. A proposal written to describe your services to any audience will have little impact. The client does not want to interpret how your offerings will benefit value – that is the writer’s task. Generic proposals do not provide a clear or persuasive document.
To ensure your proposal is as effective as possible, prepare,
plan, write, and review with the audience in mind. Time spent understanding the
reader will save time during the later proposal development stages.
A winning business proposal generally begins with an in-depth findings discussion. The writer collects information on the client’s current problem, their goals, and potential solutions. This broad discussion gathers content from the key stakeholders within the company. Participants may include a sales representative as a direct contact, a business manager with competitor analysis, an R&D researcher on new solutions, or anyone else who can provide input on the client’s needs.
Your proposal is a response to their problem. Therefore, your writer or team must have a deep understanding of their concerns, needs, and wants.
With a strong awareness of the problem, you can then propose a solution. This is the heart of the document. Your company has to pitch an offer that better suits the requirements of the client than any of your competitors.
Your proposed solution should be effective, efficient, and valuable. And each of these qualities has to be clarified within the discussion so that they can be communicated within the document. What is the overall strategy? Which features make it more cost-effective? How will your solution make the client’s work easier and better?
The findings discussion ensures the writer truly understands the
client and the solution.
A proposal does not highlight how great your business is. It highlights how great you can make your client’s business. This is one of the first things we teach in our proposal writing course.
A simple but important question to align yourself with this philosophy is: “Why?”.
Why should the client choose you?
Incorporating the audience and the results of the findings discussion, you should critically analyze your solution. Where do you add value? How does your solution increase the client’s long-term success? How do you uniquely resolve problems? Which aspects verify your trustworthiness? What impact will your solution have on their business?
Have you worked and proven yourself before? Familiarity allows the
proposal to be more refined and narrow, whereas a new client requires more
detail as to your capacity to solve their problem.
Your proposal will likely be reviewed with a series of competitors. Therefore, understanding what your competitors may offer will improve your own submission.
Some RFPs provide a list of all those companies who downloaded the proposal documents. Other times, your own understanding of your industry will indicate the likely competitors who will also be submitting.
If possible, review your competitor’s previous work to give you
context as to the solution, strategy, and pricing they will offer. Refine your
proposal plan so that it is more appealing than your competitors.
Feeling overwhelmed?
All the guidance we’ve provided on this preparation stage may seem filled with questions, ideas, and content. It has to be organized in order to make a coherent and compelling document.
We recommend using a mind map tool. It allows you to capture all of the ideas, and their relationships, that need to be incorporated into one visual layout. FreeMind is a free, open-source Mind Map tool that takes only ten minutes to learn.
Using a mind map will ensure you capture all the important concepts. Then, you can organize them into the core of a cohesive proposal document.