Proposal to
[CLIENT name]
[Insert client logo]
How to Become a Better Bid Writer & Win More Work
Submitted by
Learn to Write Proposals
[Date of submission] [Contact name in your organisation] [Your address] [Your phone number] [Your fax number] [Your email address] [Your website address]
Proposal Contents
1. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 5. 6. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ..................................................... 3 WHY LEARN TO WRITE PROPOSALS? .......................................... 5 HOW OUR TOOLS HELP ......................................................... 6 WHO IS LEARN TO WRITE PROPOSALS FOR? .......................................... 9 WHAT'S INCLUDED IN A LEARN TO WRITE PROPOSALS LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP? ................. 10 PROPOSAL ACCELERATOR ................................................. 13 SOME PROBLEMS WITH DOCUMENT PRODUCTION ......................................... 13 PROPOSAL ACCELERATOR – A SOLUTION RIGHT WITH MS WORD ............................. 14 FEATURES AND BENEFITS OF PROPOSAL ACCELERATOR: .................................. 15 CONSULTANCY ......................................................... 16 INTERNAL CAPABILITY IMPROVEMENT .............................................. 16 PROPOSAL MANAGEMENT ........................................................ 17 PROPOSAL AUDIT ........................................................... 17 RED TEAM REVIEW .......................................................... 18 IMPLEMENTATION SERVICES .................................................... 19 GETTING IN TOUCH ..................................................... 20 APPENDIX A – TYPICAL PROPOSAL SECTIONS ................................ 21
Note: Please feel free to edit, use and distribute this proposal template as much as you like, though ot course not for profit. However, please remember that all written content in this proposal is copyright of Learn to Write Proposals. As we‟ve included text in this document we‟ve saved it as a .doc file. We recommend that you make the changes you require to your template and save as a document template file. If you want guidance text and more detailed proposal templates then get a lifetime membership to Learn to Write Proposals or visit our online shop at: www.learntowriteproposals.com
1. Executive Summary
Most organisations procuring goods and services nowadays require some for of written proposal, yet many business proposals submitted to aren‟t as good as they could be. They may be rushed and finished at the last minute or perhaps the people writing the document struggle to know what to write. In these challenging times, organisations and individuals writing proposals need support in developing both management and persuasive writing skills. They need to be able to create better proposals, faster in order to spend more time finding new opportunities as managing their current accounts. How many salesmen make good project managers? Yet there is no project more important than the one that is going to bring in future revenue to your organisation. It is important that the proposal development process is used fully to develop ideas, write them down and allow time for the proposal to be properly reviewed and revised prior to submission – making sure your proposals look as professional as possible. Proper proposal management also requires looking for new opportunities (and qualifying them), sometimes managing multiple bids and looking after all your proposal content. Some salesmen are incredible at persuading clients in a face to face situation, yet struggle with persuasive writing. Add to this the non-sales staff that contribute to your sales documents highly technical writing. It‟s important to ensure that you proposal content is well-written and persuades the clients that your solution is the best for them. Your bid writing would benefit from tools that help in all these areas and more – such as creating customised proposals from your existing boilerplate content, in professional templates. Learn to Write Proposals can benefit you in many ways. Our tools are designed to help you be prepared for each step of the proposal development process and specifically to help you: Improve your proposals...and better proposals mean improved win rates Reduce the time you spend writing sales documents - more time means more time with clients and time to produce more proposals Provide a consistent proposal development process that is efficient and produces high quality sales documents
Many organisations have benefited from Learn to Write Proposals tools, by both becoming lifetime members and buy buying individual tools and templates from our online shop. Lifetime membership to Learn to Write Proposals gives you access to all our online resources and tools - including any new ones we add at a later date. Get a lifetime membership for only £195.00, which includes our desktop proposal boilerplate management tool, Proposal Accelerator (valued at £129.50). Wouldn't you pay more for more time to spend with your clients, working on projects or producing more proposals? If Learn to Write Proposals saves you a few hours of time or helps you win one piece of work it has more than paid for itself. You can become a better bid writer immediately and start benefiting from Learn to Write Proposals – for life. Go to www.learntowriteproposals.com to find out more and to join. Better proposals = more business.
2. Why Learn to Write Proposals?
At Learn to Write Proposals we have a simple goal – to help you become a better bid writer and win more work. Learn to Write Proposals gives you not just the knowledge, but practical tools and templates that enable you to respond quicker and be prepared with your best and most relevant proposal data to create winning sales documents. Do you have a proposal to write and don't know where to start? Would you like to spend less time writing proposals and more time delivering the projects you have won? Do you find the proposal writing process getting out of control with documents saved everywhere and everything done at the last minute? Would you like a way to help win more work? Using fewer resources? In less time?
If you can answer 'yes' to these questions, you know that you need help with your proposal writing and development. Many people come into a sales or proposal writing job and don't know where to start. Maybe a big RFP has landed on your desk and you haven't got a clue what sort of document you need to write, let alone plan your proposal development. Learn to Write Proposals makes it easy for you to: Clarify your best opportunities - bid on the work you can win Analyse the proposal request and formulate win theme strategies - make sure you answer the right questions, the right way Efficiently manage your proposal preparation - time poor? Use our tools to keep organised, manage risk and produce proposals faster Write high-quality, client-focused responses - use powerful selling messages, create great executive summaries and quality review your work
Create professionally presented winning proposals in less time - our templates are ready to go and include lots of great tips and Proposal Accelerator helps you put together high quality proposals faster!
Our tools help you start creating a winning proposal straight away, make it easy for your to manage the proposal and help you easily capture, save, manage, insert and customise proposal boilerplate into pre-formatted templates. Plus as you develop your proposal writing capabilities we will always be there with new ideas, suggestions, tools and resources to help you create better proposals, faster.
2.1. How our tools help
Our tools are designed to help you be ready for when you need to write a proposal and throughout each stage of the proposal writing process. Our ready-to-use tools are designed to: Improve your proposals...and better proposals mean improved win rates Reduce the time you spend writing sales documents more time means more time with clients and time to produce more proposals Provide a consistent proposal development process that is efficient and produces high quality sales documents
Tender notice Looking for a tender opportunity - use our links to find tender publication and sourcing portals. Perhaps some of the terminology is confusing? Why not look up a term in our proposal glossary. Request for Proposal/Invitation to Tender
Have a tender notice or bid document identified? Our Bid Qualification toolkit supports you in the evaluation of the opportunity. The toolkit includes our bid/no-bid planner helping guide you through making a bid/no-bid decision. It also includes our Bid Probability Engine, an interactive tool to help you constantly evaluate the prospect and understands your prospecting strengths and weaknesses. Pre-qualification Our Pre-qualification toolkit is designed to help you collect and keep all the information that you need in order to be prepared for pre-qualification - every time. Proposal writing and management Proposal writing should be a treated as a structured project. Therefore our tools include a proposal tracker and proposal planning tool to help you manage the logistics of multiple proposals as well as the contents of individual proposal projects. Our capture plan tool and competitor evaluation matrix are designed to help you clarify your win strategy and themes. We have proposal template packs for you to choose from in a wide range of styles and designs. Each one comes with guidance documents to help you create a strong clientfocused proposal as well as a cover letter template (with guidance). We also have a range of letter proposal templates, again each one with guidance text. Find out how our power words can help create a winning message. Proposal Accelerator used with our templates can help you create an outline proposal in minutes allowing you time to create new solution driven content. Sell your people and your track record with our resume and evidence of capability templates that you can cut and paste directly into your proposal templates. Show the client you understand risk with our easy-to-complete risk management assessment plan. Pre-submission Using our proposal planning tool should ensure that you have your proposal finished in time. Now use our interactive quality checklists to go through your proposal and ensure that you have written a compliant, clear and consistent document.
Submission Our proposal quality checklist helps you evaluate the quality of your proposals prior to submission and help you identify those key areas for improvement. We believe these tools help your create better proposals faster. Why not try it risk free for thirty days?
2.2. Who is Learn to Write Proposals for?
Learn to Write Proposals is a resource centre for micro, small and medium size business who want to improve proposal development and win rates. Our resources help sales professionals, bid team members and others involved in the proposal writing process create better and more organised proposal content in less time. All members have lifetime access to all existing and new content, never paying any additional fees or charges. The Salesperson Do you want to have more time for working on leads, meeting clients and managing accounts? Do you find it difficult to manage the proposal development process? Does everything seem to be done at the last minute? A membership to Learn to Write Proposals provides you with the tools to manage your proposals, prepare your proposal content, create client-focused and professionallooking proposals in less time. The Manager Do you want to organise your proposal collateral? Implement a bid team? Create proposals using fewer resources and in less time? Have access to tools, resources and professional development without paying expensive consultancy or product fees? Learn to Write Proposals has ready-made tools and resources for managing and developing content at every stage of the proposal development process. Shortly, the „Write Winning Proposals‟ e-learning course will deliver a comprehensive and affordable professional development opportunity for all your proposal development staff. The non-sales proposal writer Are you a Project Manager, Software Developer, Engineer or other staff member that has an internal facing role, but need to contribute valuable date to proposals? Do you find it hard to make time for writing proposals and communicate in the same language and style of writing as the sales teams?
Learn to Write Proposals has template packs and tools designed for the non-professional proposal writer to create client-focused solutions quickly – in the right language for your organisations sales documents. New proposal writers Are you new to writing or contributing to proposals? Have you just joined a bid team or starting a career in sales? Has your boss just asked you to write a proposal for one of your clients and you don‟t know where to start? Our tools and templates help you manage the process, step-by-step and give you the structured documents you need to be able to create a professional looking response. Other tools help you find the win themes for your solution and qualify your progress at any stage.
2.3. What's included in a Learn to Write Proposals lifetime membership?
With every lifetime membership to Learn to Write Proposals you'll get the tools to help you become a better bid writer. We‟ll help you: Qualify your leads and opportunities Prepare your content ready for proposal writing Manage your bid processes and proposal development Improve the quality of your proposal submissions Write more winning proposals, using fewer resources in less time
We are always adding to these resources and all new resources will be available for life without any additional charges or upgrade fees to those with an existing membership to Learn to Write Proposals. Our current tools include: Proposal Accelerator The MS Word Add-on that provides you with an individual proposal automation solution allowing you to create customised proposals in a fraction of your usual time. Prospect Qualification Toolkit Our Bid/No-bid chart and Prospecting engine help you decide whether to bid and also to continuously qualify your opportunities Pre-qualification toolkit Be prepared and be ready with all the typical information you need to get through pre-qualification Power words and phrases improve your selling message by using our power words and phrases Proposal Template Packs Instantly create professional looking proposals in a wide range of styles and proposal layouts. Each pack includes: Blank Template Template document with guidance text Cover letter template Cover letter with guidance text Proposal letter template Proposal letter template with guidance
Bid Management Toolkit Keep your bids organised and on the winning track using our: Capture planning tool - define and develop your proposal strategy and win themes Proposal development plan - structure, plan and get on top of each bid submission
Competitor evaluation matrix - build up profiles of competitor strengths and weaknesses Proposal tracker - Use this tool to monitor the status of all your bids and keep a record of your success rate
Risk Management Toolkit - assess risk in your proposal development and learn how to present your project risk assessments in your proposal Proposal Quality Checklist - evaluate your proposal prior to submission in order to gain data on the strengths and weaknesses of your proposal Killer executive summaries - use our structured eight step process to create killer executive summaries Free newsletter and newsletter archive - get access to our newsletter archive, including interviews and articles on writing winning proposals
3. Proposal Accelerator
3.1. Some problems with document production
Producing high-quality documentation can be timeconsuming and therefore expensive. Most organisations would like to be able to produce more consistent proposals, faster. You would like to benefit from improved consistency not only across a discrete document, but across all sales related documents produced by their salesforce. Proposal Accelerator will do this for you. Inconsistency and idiosyncrasies in MS Word Inconsistent documents can not only more easily contain errors, but may leave the target client confused and/or with issues regarding quality. Additionally, “fixing” broken documents to your high corporate standard can take time that would be far better utilised in the development and writing of the proposal content. Most organisations create their proposals in the industry standard - MS Word. The problems start when inconsistent formatting from different fonts, bullet points, headings, numbering and other MS Word elements causes new documents to look like they have been cut and pasted at the last minute whereas you need your clients to know that their proposal was created just for them. It’s in here somewhere With the many proposals and documents that have already been written there is a large repository of content containing an enormous amount of re-usable data, if it could be easily organised, customised and re-used. I’m running out of time Sometimes needs to submit a proposal at the last minute, to satisfy the just-in-time expectations of the client. Finding that good content and creating a professionallooking document can take too long to effectively customise the document to the client‟s needs.
I’d rather be somewhere else Your salespeople want to be with clients. Your sales professionals and consultants from a technical background dislike the process of developing a sales document. This results in proposals that aren‟t always prepared with the 100% focus of those prepared by a professional bid writer.
3.2. Proposal Accelerator – a solution right with MS Word
Every salesperson and sales team manager wants to maximise their exposure to clients, yet sometimes you always seem to be in the office writing up sales proposals and documents. Time is wasted not only writing documents, but looking for the right documents to attach or hunting for a previous proposal to cut and paste some text from. If only there was an affordable, easy-to-use system to help create sales proposals that made it easy to re-use good proposal text yet still customise and personalise the proposal to an individual client. The Proposal Accelerator is just that tool. It‟s an easyto-use add-on to MS Word giving you the capability to create and customise great proposals – sometimes in just minutes!
3.3. Features and benefits of Proposal Accelerator:
Capture any text, section or image from any MS Word document – or even the whole document! No need to re-write that great proposal text – instantly save it for next time. Save as boilerplate documents or templates. Choose the best format for your captured content to maximise flexibility. Categorise each section for easy recovery. relevant content is collated and easy to find. All
Manage and edit all content and categories. You are always in control of all your proposal content. Instantly insert your re-usable content into your document. No searching for the right section in the right proposal and cutting and pasting. Personalise proposals using fields. You can create powerful customer-focussed proposals, not just “generic” messages. Create consistent proposals – even across an entire sales team. Get your most persuasive message across accurately - every time you send out a proposal. Create proposals faster. Spend clients, not writing proposals. more time with
Installs in seconds – simple setup process. Simple to install, does not require technical knowledge. Installs as a mini-application in MS Word. Stay within your familiar proposal writing environment – no need to install additional applications Support available via www.learntowriteproposals.com email and at
Proposal Accelerator is included with every Learn to Write Proposals lifetime membership
4. Consultancy
In addition to our online resources available to subscribers, Learn to Write Proposals offers a range of bespoke consultancy services to help you define your bid strategy and improve the quality of your proposal processes and proposal content. We work in partnership with you to develop approaches that improve performance and produce winning proposals.
4.1. Internal capability improvement
Working with you to benchmark existing processes and define an optimum bid process for your organisation we‟ll give you the tools required to implement our recommendations including bespoke bid management tools, quality tools, branded templates and Proposal Accelerator. If past proposals are available we will undertake a full proposal audit. Also, we can help you prepare content required for prequalification questionnaires and standard proposal responses (re-usable "boilerplate"). We will take this content and re-work it to ensure it has maximum impact of your organisation, giving particular emphasis to creating persuasive content for you business proposals. The aim of our internal capability consultancy is to ensure that your team has the required tools and skills to improve your proposal writing and proposal success rate. Not only will this ensure better proposals, but reduce the time and cost of proposal preparation.
4.2. Proposal management
The business driver for improving proposal processes and content is an upcoming procurement that your organisation is keen to win. We can provide a specialist service to manage this critical process - from expressing interest and prequalification, through proposal strategy and preparation to client presentation. We will manage the bid process for you, implementing best practice along the way and leaving you with a legacy of content and proposal preparation tools that you can use in future bids. Having external bid management ensures that your internal resources can concentrate on develop the winning solution required, whilst we concentrate on ensuring the efficient production of a compliant, customer-focused proposal. Our consultancy is available as a "cradle to grave" service throughout the entire procurement process or we can help with a specific element of your bid preparation.
4.3. Proposal Audit
Do you already submit tenders and proposals? Are you happy with your win rate? Win or lose you should always get feedback on your proposals and use this information to develop your future proposals. We can go one step further - reviewing and analysing a number of your proposals using an independent team to give you detailed actions to improve your proposals.
The audit will: Review your response documentation against the issued tender
Identify any problems with content, presentation and consistency in each proposal section Assess the value proposition against the clients evaluation criteria
Once the audit is complete we will present you will a detailed report and action plan to help you instantly improve the quality of your proposal submissions. We can also provide further support to help you implement our recommendations. Each proposal audit is unique - whether it be reviewing one tender or ten we can help.
4.4. Red Team Review
Monitoring bid quality vital to success. and continuous improvement is
We can provide reviews throughout the bid preparation process, providing an independent viewpoint at regular intervals, including having an independent panel to review your finished proposal prior to submission. This can benefit your bid by:
Ensuring that the bid is reviewed from the clients perspective and to their criteria Providing effective feedback to the bid team on area's of weakness and potential improvements
Our red team will evaluate against the original RFP, provide proposal scoring and provide a complete commented proposal for your referral. This will give you the fastest way of integrating any required changes into your proposal. If a business or technical specialism is required, we can help find appropriately qualified specialists to be part of the red team.
4.5. Implementation Services
To help you improve your proposal production using Proposal Accelerator we offer a full consultative implementation and utilisation service. Our consultancy can cover a range of services best suited to you, all aimed at improving your proposal efficiency using Proposal Accelerator: Auditing existing processes and procedures Review and analysis of existing proposal content Re-writing and creation of new proposal content and bespoke templates Development of structured proposal response process Training practice in Proposal Accelerator use and best
Ongoing support as required
We can help you use Proposal Accelerator to make you a better proposal writer - creating better proposals in less time. Use Proposal Accelerator best practice and your proposals (and PQQs) will be more consistent, higher quality and win more work.
5. Getting in Touch
To find out more about Learn to Write Proposals then you can contact us three ways:
www.learntowriteproposals.com info@learntowriteproposals.com Skype: learntowriteproposals
Get a lifetime membership and start creating better proposals and winning more work
6. Appendix A – Typical proposal sections
We‟ve not used typical proposal headings in this document, because it‟s not a typical proposal. It‟s an example of proposal content and we hope that it demonstrates some of the benefits of Learn to Write Proposals content to you. If you want full proposal templates, including guidance text to help you know what to include in each section and write persuasive content, then get your lifetime membership of Learn to Write Proposals, or visit our online shop at http://www.learntowriteproposals.com Here is a more typical structure (though not definitive) for a business proposal: Executive Summary Our understanding of your requirement o Scope of required work Our proposed solution o Table of compliance Schedule o Project plan o Key dates Costs o Table of costs o Budget assumptions o Invoicing schedule o Estimated expenses Project team o Project team structure o Project team profiles Our profile o Company overview o Previous experience o Project management o Quality assurance Appendix A - Accounts Appendix B - Product datasheets