Page 12 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Introduction 3

Many offend with cut-and-paste boilerplate, miss important opportunities to pro-
vide value, suffer from poor logic and organization, and focus more on you than on
me and my organization. Although some do a few things well, some don’t do much
well at all. All can be improved, and I guarantee that I can help you improve them.
I’m not saying your proposal will always win. That I can’t guarantee. But I do
promise that you’ll prepare better proposals—because you’ll think more strategically
about how to write and present them. Getting you to think and write more strategi-
cally, particularly from my point of view, is one of the major goals of this book.
So what do I as a potential client, either outside or within your organization,
want from your proposal? Nothing that should surprise you. From my perspec-
tive, I want to feel that you and your team can best meet my objectives and achieve
my desired results from engaging you. Therefore, I desire:

◉ Agreement on my question, i.e., on the specific question or questions that
must be answered to move my organization from our current situation to our
desired result
◉ A clear understanding of the benefits I will receive by your answering that ques-
tion—benefits I will gain during, by the end of, and beyond the proposed project
◉ Clarity on how you propose to answer the question and the way we will work
together as you do so
◉ Confidence in and comfort with you and your proposed team
◉ Return on my investment from my actual and/or anticipated benefits

To help you address these desires, I’ve developed the proven proposal-development
process summarized in Figure I.1. Although preparing effective and persuasive
proposals involves far more than Figure I.1 illustrates (and this book covers much
more than the process shown), the following five steps will provide you with a road
map for the journey we’ll take through much of this book.

1. Understand the baseline logic. Every proposal situation involves a real or
perceived discrepancy between where I and my organization are and where
we want to be—between, that is, our current situation (let’s call it S1) and our
desired result (S2). The project or ideas you propose will achieve or get us closer
to achieving that desired result and therefore begin to or entirely remove that
discrepancy. Consequently, benefits (B) will accrue to us. At its fundamental
level, your proposal must clearly express the relationship between my current
situation, my desired result, and the benefits of my achieving that result. I call
this the proposal’s “baseline logic,” represented by the formula S1 → S2 → B. Your
proposal (and your project, if you win) stands little chance of success if these
elements aren’t clearly identified, logically related, and agreed to. I discuss this
relationship in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.