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Steps For Writing A Business Proposal

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Steps for Writing a Business Proposal

One of the most important aspects of writing a winning proposal is first understanding the business’s goals and objectives. This will help to define the steps for writing a business proposal that will incorporate a good understanding of the problem that they are facing and the type of solution that they are looking for.
In addition, you need to communicate what your company does, its unique capabilities, experience, and qualifications as well as identify your company’s achievements, milestones, overall vision, and mission or future plans; and why your company is ideal for providing the solution that will solve or mitigate their primary problem.

The next key is to provide your technical approach describing exactly how your company will effectively implement your solution along with proof that you have successfully accomplished this approach in the past with other clients. Your technical approach must also identify the resources you’ll use to implement your solution, which may include a schedule of events and a breakdown of the costs associated with those resources.
Business proposals are different than government agency proposals in that they typically do not have a large number of compliance requirements or provide detailed information about exactly what to include. They may put out a formal solicitation or request for proposal (RFP). In these cases, you need to provide them with the information that they request. They may also ask informally for a proposal so that they can evaluate your company’s capabilities. To respond, you will need to do much more research into their specific issues in order to address them appropriately. Then, your may be interested in providing an unsolicited proposal, which is actually more of a marketing effort where you are primarily interested in gaining their attention and having them contact you about your services. Since you do not have specific knowledge about their pressing issues, the emphasis on your capabilities is key.

In business proposals, it is extremely important that you provide an Executive Summary to introduce your company, demonstrate your company’s achievements, and proposed solutions. Even so, keep the content clear and concise which peaks their interest to investigate the more detailed content in the technical approach itself. This is effectively done by clearly outlining the problem and emphasizing the need and urgency of the issue. The reader now will be interested in reading about your solution to their problem.

When defining the steps for writing a business proposal and presenting the problem, show a clear understanding of their pressing needs as you know them, which demonstrates that you are not just providing a generic pitch. With this approach you have the opportunity to identify problems and issues that they might not even be aware of, implying that you most likely have a solution that they will benefit from.
When presenting your proposed solution, you will identify exactly how you will relieve your prospect of their various pain points. This is often best represented in its own section, which can be referred to again and again. Provide detailed information and include a timeline of events. Of course, this only gets you so far since at this point, they have no idea that you can actually deliver what you are promising.

Following your proposed solution, support your methods and approaches with proofs by referring to past projects/clients where you have successfully implemented similar solutions. Name your past clients, who on your team led the effort, and the results and timelines that were achieved.

These proofs lead us to another key section, which includes references, client testimonials, and project profiles or case studies as well as any industry awards received. This third-party evidence builds trust and creates confidence in your company’s abilities to achieve your stated end results.

The next question will be when can you do this and over what period of time?

Flow charts or Gantt charts work best showing what gets done, when, and by whom. Sometimes, graphic representations of events along a flow chart work great, especially for long-term projects.
In your pricing section, identifying any legal issues is appropriate, but the primary focus is on the fees you will charge, how you schedule receiving payment, and any special terms & conditions. It is also best to keep this a bit open by offering a couple of options. The key is to ensure that your profit over costs is acceptable to you and that your overall price is not cost-prohibitive to your client.

If you are at the point where you are seeking a go, no-go, you will want to include the contract terms and conditions with signature blocks for your client to sign and date. Your company’s signature block can also be filled out, signed, and dated to get things moving forward.
Some things to consider throughout the proposal is to use your company logo and other brand identity graphics and taglines that reiterate your mission, goals, and/or values as a business. Also, links to your website are good when you have quality information that will help your prospects solidify their decision to move forward.

10 Ways To Keep Your Project Manager Happy

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Project managers: the most powerful, and yet under-appreciated, person in a creative agency. Here’s how to say thank you, show some appreciation, and stay on your PM’s good side while they’re herding all those “cats”.

The most powerful person in a creative agency is the often under-appreciated project manager. Project managers are assigning creative teams, managing schedules, and basically calling the shots when it comes to who’s doing what and when it’s due. If you want to impress one person in your office, start with the project manager
Get on her good side and you’ll be laughing: she’ll assign you to the fun projects, she’ll build extra time into the schedule for you, and she may even allocate you extra hours for “creative development” in her budget (i.e. beers at lunch).

Pissing off your project manager is the last thing you want to do unless you enjoy working on only your agency’s notorious worst clients, slaving away on weekends for “last minute deadlines”, and being harrassed about your timesheets every five minutes. Your project manager can make every day a living hell or a carnival fantasyland. It’s all up to you.

Here are 10 tips for staying on your project manager’s nice list.

10. Do not start off every meeting she schedules by asking “Is this going to be a long meeting?” 

As much as it may seem like project managers enjoy sitting in meetings all day for fun, they do not. They, like you, have a lot of other shit to do. Making her feel bad about the meeting she’s scheduled is not helping your case.

9. Be on time. 

Project managers are prompt by nature and they appreciate it when you are as well. If an appointment starts at 10:00, be there at 9:50. If your deadline is 4:00, have your work submitted a little bit earlier to make sure there’s room to go wrong. If a project manager sees you as someone who is on time and reliable, he will respect that.

8. Ask for her opinion. 

Project managers are often seen as uncreative time-management Nazis, but they are so much more than walking, talking, Excel files. Project managers are involved with so many projects and clients, they often have valuable creative insights or ideas and will jump at the chance to get involved beyond creating estimates and timelines. Making her part of the creative process will earn you a gazillion PM brownie points.

7. Hang out outside the office. 

Yes, project managers also eat lunch, drink alcohol, play basketball…if you’re doing extracurriculars with your team, invite the PM. Getting to know him as someone beyond the person who bitches at you to do your timesheets every Friday will help your relationship in a huge way.

6. Give her credit. 

Let’s say your team just landed a big client or killed it at a creative presentation. If you’re recognizing the contributions of everyone on the team, for God’s sake, mention your project manager. They are the most likely to be forgotten, in spite of most likely playing a huge behind-the-scenes role in the work, and they’re also the most likely to be bitter and make you work next weekend.

5. Don’t make him hunt you down. 

Let your PM know where you’re at with your assignments. If something is going to be delayed, give him lots of heads up. Make sure he knows the status of what you’re working on. Keeping him in the loop rather than forcing him to go all Mantracker on your ass makes his job easier, which in turn makes your life happier.

4. Read your @#$@ing emails. 

Once again, she’s not sending you these emails for her own good health. Many horrendous communication disasters can be averted by people actually reading their emails. Nothing makes the project manager prickle faster than hearing “yeah, I saw your email but I didn’t open it yet.”

3. Respond to calendar invites – but NOT with maybe. 

Honestly, I don’t know why ‘maybe’ is even an option when responding to a meeting request. Just commit one way or another.

2. Don’t leave her hanging. 

Project managers are typically a little type-A by nature. They like to know details and they like to be prepared for anything. The more information you can provide her about any project, the better. If you’re worried that you may be overcommunicating, chances are you’re doing a good job.

1. Say thank you. 

Project managers know they’re annoying at times and all that management can make him feel like a nagging mother-in-law. Just a simple ‘’thank you’ or a note of appreciation can make him feel like he doesn’t exist solely to rain on your parade. Thank him for setting up a presentation, sending around a meeting recap, or sourcing a new screen printer… say a genuine thank you from time to time. Then sit back and watch all the fun projects roll your way.

 

Creating Faster Proposals: A Comprehensive Guide

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Creating Faster Proposals: A Comprehensive Guide

Proposals that reach clients quickly tend to close faster, so you don’t have any time to waste. You need to get that proposal out before your big deal moves on to your competition. Here’s how to streamline your proposal process and get your offers out the door more efficiently.

The Proposal Paradox

Most businesses have a love/hate relationship with proposals. On one hand, proposals bring clients, work, and money into your business. Without proposals, you have nothing. Winning proposals is exhilarating.

However, creating proposals can be an entirely different beast. It’s often extremely time-consuming – writing, designing, pricing, proofing, and finally getting the thing out the door and into the hands of your sales lead. By that theny might have gone cold in the days or weeks it’s taken you to get back to them. The creation process can be painful, but it’s a necessary step in closing deals.

But here’s the thing: proposals that get to clients close faster. You don’t have time to waste. You need to get that proposal out before your big deal moves on to your competition.

How Can You Create Proposals Faster?

1. Know What You’re Selling Before You Sell It

Make sure you know exactly what you’re going to propose before you start working on your business proposal. You should already clearly understand what your sales lead needs and what your solution is before you type a single word.

Many people make the mistake of developing their strategy as they write the proposal, which is incredibly inefficient. It increases the amount of time you spend writing because you’re busy thinking and strategizing.

Your services should already be set and easily articulated; you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel for every proposal. Whether you sell digital marketing services, architectural design, or solar panels, you know what you offer, and, if you’ve done your homework, you know what your client needs. Put the two together.

This isn’t the time to let the ingredients simmer on the stove – this is the time to plate the food and serve it up.

2. Use Online Proposal Software, Period

If you want to create proposals faster, you must use some type of online proposal software. It’s designed to streamline your whole proposal process. From writing to design to sending and tracking, online proposal software unites all your separate tools and steps under one efficient roof. No more juggling Word docs, Google docs, InDesign files, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides.

Here are several ways that online proposal software can help you create proposals faster:

a) Business Proposal Templates

Most proposal software products offer templates as part of your subscription. These templates are professionally written and designed to help kickstart your proposal process.

Often, writing a proposal can be the most time-consuming part of the whole process, and writer’s block can plague even the most seasoned writer. With a template, the provided sample text can unlock your ideas and provide a guideline for what you might want to express in your proposal.

Don’t worry that you might submit the same proposal as your competition – most proposal templates are customizable so you can tailor them to your specific service, brand, and client project. The template just gives you a running start.

The same goes for proposal design. Templates have already been designed, so you don’t have to wait for a designer to be free or hire a freelance designer who could take even more time (not to mention money). Good online proposal software makes it easy to swap images, change fonts, and add color, without needing a professional graphic designer.

Templates often cover a variety of services and industries, so before choosing online proposal software, have a look at their selection. But if they allow customization, you can choose any template you want and fine-tune it to quickly create your winning proposal.

b) Content Library

During proposal writing, one of the most frustrating and time-consuming parts of the process is pulling together the content.

Maybe you wrote a great description of your branding services for your last proposal – or was it the one before that? But now no one knows where it is. Is it on your computer? Is it on someone else’s computer? Is this even the final version that was used in the proposal? And how about the description of your digital marketing services? You think that was in a proposal from a few months ago. Can’t find it? Guess you’ll have to start from scratch.

Good online proposal software offers some type of content library where you can store all of your different proposal sections in one place so anyone on your team can access them at any time.

No more hunting for team bios, the ‘About Us’ description, case studies, or fee tables. Much of what you’re selling to potential clients is repeated from proposal to proposal, so why recreate it every time? Yes, you’ll need to customize some things to fit the particular needs of a client, but that takes far less time than going back to the drawing board to rewrite every proposal section every time you have a new proposal to create.

To maximize the time-saving benefits of a content library, you’ll need to do some work upfront to create the sections and input them into the library, so they’re easy to find. But, once they’re in there, you can drag and drop each section into your proposal where you need them, significantly reducing the time it takes to write a proposal.

c) Online Proposal Views

Can we all agree that snail mail is great for birthday cards, but it’s not so great for closing deals quickly?

If you’re printing proposals, assembling them, and then dropping them into the mail, you’re adding days – or maybe even weeks if something goes awry with your printer or the postal service – before your clients receive anything. And every day they don’t have a proposal from you is one more day they could receive a proposal from your competition.

Even emailing a PDF can be troublesome as large attachments get caught in spam, so the client doesn’t even see your proposal, or something goes wrong with the file and they can’t open it.

With online proposal software, you email your client a customized link to view their proposal online on any device, at any time. It arrives quickly, with no issues, and looks professional. There’s no faster way to get your proposal in front of your client.

d) Online Signatures and Payments

You want to get a proposal to your client quickly, but it doesn’t end there. What you want is to close this deal quickly, and to do that, you need to make it easy for your client to say ‘YES’ right away.

Adding online signature buttons to your proposal can help get significantly faster approval. Good online proposal software products have an online signature tool that lets clients sign your proposal right in the browser and makes the contract legally binding.

Even better is the ability to add an online payment request to your proposal, so you get paid as soon as your client signs off.

e) Proposal Metrics

While online proposal software helps you create and deliver proposals faster, some products go a step further by providing metrics to keep you informed of everything that’s happening with your proposals.

Proposal metrics let you see when your client opened the proposal, which sections they spent the most time viewing and how long they looked at it, along with close rates broken down across teams and individuals so you can track success.

All of this information gives you insight into what’s working and what isn’t so you can improve your approach for your next proposal, making it easier and faster to create a winning proposal.

3. Practice Makes Perfect Proposals

Overall, if you want to improve the time it takes to create a proposal, you need a system and you need to stick to it. That includes online proposal software, but even the best tools are worthless if you don’t use them consistently or correctly.

Be as prepared as possible before you start so you can snap all the pieces together instead of wasting time creating the pieces as you go. Look for as many ways to eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies as possible.

The more proposals you create, the easier and faster it will get over time. But be sure to learn from each proposal – if it won, why did it win so you can repeat the same formula? If your proposal didn’t win, find out why so you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

The Importance of Speed

And one last piece of proposal advice: don’t procrastinate. Remember, every moment you waste getting a proposal to your client is an opportunity for your competition to get ahead of you.

By implementing these strategies and consistently refining your process, you’ll be able to create winning proposals more quickly and efficiently, giving your business a competitive edge in the market. Speed, combined with quality, can make all the difference in closing deals and growing your business.