Page 21 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

12 Writing Winning Business Proposals

“ordering,” “eating,” “tipping,” and “paying.” Your schema for house may con-
tain slots for “family room,” “kitchen,” “living room,” and “bathroom.” A slot for
“home office” is also possible, but probably not for “boardroom” or “conference
room,” since such spaces typically are not found in residences. Therefore, you
don’t expect to find a boardroom or a conference room in someone’s house.
You also have schemas for different kinds of texts, and these schemas create
expectations. In a novel, for example, you expect character and plot and setting.
In a particular type of novel, such as a spy novel, you may expect that the hero will
be betrayed and captured, only to escape and triumph. In a eulogy, you expect
some account of the deceased person’s character and accomplishments; in a per-
sonal letter, some account of your friend’s life and feelings; in a sermon, some
moral based on a religious belief. If the sermon consisted solely of an analysis
of price-earnings ratios or bills of materials or various strategies for penetrating
new markets, your expectations would be denied, and you’d be suspicious of the
speaker’s competence and reliability, maybe even his or her sanity.
Proposals and other business documents also carry with them schemas and
sets of expectations. If I asked you to submit a proposal to me, I’d be surprised
if the document contained findings, conclusions, and recommendations. These
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are slots I’d expect in a report, not a proposal. Potential clients like me, then,
have certain expectations, and as a writer, you’re at some risk if you don’t meet
those expectations. If your reader is in a proposal-reading situation, you’d better
deliver a document that fits your reader’s proposal schema, not the schema for a
report or a eulogy or a novel.
Your schema for a proposal also has slots, and those slots make up what I call a
proposal’s generic structure. No matter how different one proposal may be from
another, something generic makes them both proposals, and that something is
their generic structure.

The Slots in a Proposal’s Generic Structure

Most of your proposal opportunities exist because I, your potential client, have an
unsolved problem or an unrealized opportunity. Therefore, your primary task is
to convince me, both logically and psychologically, that you can help me address
my problem or opportunity and, in competitive situations, that you’ll do so bet-
ter than anyone else.
Your entire proposal needs to communicate that message in one seamless
argument (which may happen to be divided into sections or even volumes for my
convenience). Your argument is suggested by the following propositions, each of
which is preceded by the proposal slot that contains it. (See Figure 1.1.)