Page 210 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Writing the Benefits Section 201

the benefits of your staff’s abilities and your firm’s capabilities. Your Themes
Development Worksheet can help you here. If, for example, one of my hot but-
tons is urgency, your approach will be beneficial if it will deliver results quickly
and your qualifications slot will be persuasive if it argues that you’re capable of
and experienced in doing so.
But you might not want to leave all the separate strands of benefits scattered
throughout the document or presentation, especially since they can make a pow-
erful conclusion to your proposal if you bring them together in one final section
or series of summary paragraphs. The overall movement of your proposal will
be like this: It will begin by discussing my organization’s current situation; it will
end by describing how we will benefit from your helping us to achieve our desired
result and by summarizing how and why your methods and your qualifications
for performing them will best achieve that result. Therefore, you should consider
this part of your proposal, whether it’s a separate section or not, a persuasive
summary—a strategically presented conclusion of your proposal’s major selling
points. It will be a persuasive summary if you summarize the most important ele-
ments to us in some of the preceding generic structure slots (e.g., methods and
qualifications). It will be a persuasive summary if you summarize the benefits
you have articulated throughout.

CHAPTER 12 REVIEW
Writing the Benefits Section

To structure your benefits section:
◉ You can generate persuasive content by using the Logics, Psychologics, and Themes
Development Worksheets.
◉ Benefits can exist throughout the proposal (for example, in the closing component of
your background section, in the closing P-slots of METHODS, and in QUALIFICATIONS).
◉ Although they can exist throughout the proposal, benefits can be gathered at the
end to form a persuasive summary, a value-laden conclusion to your document or
presentation.

WORK SESSION 10: The Content of the Benefits Section
To show you how to compose a persuasive summary of your written or oral pro-
posal, I will complete the last work session of this book.
To organize the large number of benefits captured on the three worksheets, I
sorted them into three categories: