Page 302 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

APPENDIX G

Reading RFPs

f you want a quick sense of how many different kinds of proposals there are, you
Ishould search Amazon.com using the key words proposal writing, as I did a few
1
months ago. Thirty-three of the three dozen bestselling books, including this one,
focused on specific kinds of proposals: business proposals, consulting proposals,
sales proposals, grant proposals for university researchers, grant proposals for not-
for-profit community organizations, and dissertation proposals. You’d be amazed
at the specific focus of these books—for example, an entire book on obtaining
funding for nursing research and another on obtaining funding for spatial science
research. These last two books were among the top-36 bestsellers! Many more schol-
arly nurses and spatial scientists must exist than I (and, I bet, you) ever imagined.
Only three books focused on proposals in general. One was clearly marketed
as a textbook rather than a trade book. Another, The Zen of Proposal Writing,
focused on a particular approach for writing proposals as well as, we can assume,
everything else.
A good reason exists for the large number of books that focus on specific kinds
of proposals rather than on proposals in general: Although all proposals have
the generic structure slots situation, objectives, methods, qualifications,
costs, and benefits, the subgenres are very different. Writing Winning Business
Proposals is incredibly helpful in writing business (and, more specifically, consult-
ing) proposals, but only about 80 percent of this book’s content would help you
write various kinds of grant proposals. Generalizations about proposals can be
useful. They can also be dead wrong.
The same can be said for books and articles that generalize about requests for
proposals (RFPs). A book on responding to guidelines from the National Institutes

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