|
Focus on What's Important in Your Proposal Sections
By Dan Safford
Here's a question I get asked often:
"How do I figure out what to say in my sections when there is so much I could say? Where do I begin?"
The technical folks usually ask it. They are faced with an RFP
requirement that is pretty vague, like "Describe your approach to
Mission Control Software" or, even worse, "Mission Control Software"
under a general heading of "System Specifications." Furthermore, they
are often given a tight page limit.
The problem is that the expert has a lot to say about the subject. She
could go on and on about any topic in her field. And, left unchecked,
she often will. The author is faced with a universe of data from which
to choose as she decides what to write about. And what do you think
she'll do? She'll likely write about that with which she is most
familiar and comfortable-technical data with no real proposal focus.
That's why technical sections are often so dense and irrelevant to the proposal.
Plus, the frustration of not knowing what to write will keep many
authors from starting immediately. This is one of the biggest reasons
authors procrastinate when it comes to writing the sections they have
been assigned.
What's the solution? It's something you learned years ago, back in high
school. Topic sentences. Remember topic sentences? They appear
somewhere near the top of a paragraph, announcing what the rest of the
paragraph (or set of paragraphs) will be about. As your English teacher
told you, the topic sentence prepares the reader for what you are about
to discuss.
What your English teacher also told you is that the topic sentence
focuses the writer's attention on what to say in the subsequent
paragraphs. This is as true in proposals as it is in any other kind of
writing. In fact, topic sentences are even more important in proposals
because in proposals every word you write has to be focused on
addressing the customer's needs. Get off the track, and the reader will
quit reading and will miss all that you have to offer.
But topic sentences don't simply arise from the authors' minds. They,
too, have to be linked to something-and that's where your strategy
comes in. It's critical that you have developed proposal themes, main
messages that you want to send. It helps the authors develop topic
sentences.
Say you have arrived at the following as one of your proposal themes:
"We offer the lowest risk technical solution to meet [the customer's] needs."
This gives focus to the author who is responsible for preparing the
section on Mission Control Software. He can develop topics (and
associated topic sentences) that show how your approach to MCS offers
the lowest technical risk. Having that degree of focus limits the
authors' universe of potential things to say to a very manageable few
things to say. This significantly reduces the potential amount of
information he has to include in his section and increases the chances
he'll supply pertinent information. Plus, he's more likely to get it in
on time.
The lesson: Develop proposal themes and drive them down to your
sections. Base your sections on the themes and you give your authors a
better idea of where to start. And they're likely to give you better
input more quickly.
|
