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The Most Important Section in Your Proposal
By Dan Safford
Which section is the most important one in your proposal? Some will say
it's the offer itself-the product or service you are proposing to your
customer. Others will say it's the pricing section-what the service
will cost the customer. I've heard compelling arguments that the
Executive Summary (or the cover letter, if you choose to write one
instead of an ES) is the most critical. Heck. I've given arguments that
the ES is the most important section.
You can make a good case for the project team section as the most
important when you are proposing to conduct a project for the customer.
Or the management section, or the relevant experience section, and on
and on.
But lately I have been working on a proposal that made me realize what
is really the most important section-or sections, with an "s"-in the
proposal is. Are you ready? It's the introductions. Not just the
Introduction, with a capital "I", but the short small "i" intros to the
various sections of your proposal. The one-paragraph things that sort
of transition the reader from one major idea to another. These
paragraphs are absolutely critical.
Why critical? Three reasons:
- It makes your proposal more reader-friendly.
- It allows you to state the benefits up front to peak their interest.
- It makes your proposal more reader-friendly.
Remember that in most proposals
not all of the people reading your proposal are interested in the same
things. The technical reader wants to get to the technical stuff, The
reader who will evaluate your costs is mainly interested in your
pricing structure. The reader who is evaluating your proposal from a
user's perspective (if, for example, you're proposing a software
solution to a customer's problem) will be most interested in the
impacts your solution will have on the people who will use the solution
once it's in place.
Being reader-friendly means giving each reader a way to tell whether or
not she needs to read the sections as she encounters them. The best way
to do that is to provide a crisp summary that quickly spells out what
the following sections will cover.
The following sections
address the specific features of our software and how users can
customize them to meet their unique requirements. Specifically, this
section addresses how to use CommonSense to make changes to the common
set of engineering tools distributed throughout the environment. It
also discusses how to make specific modifications to the toolset on a
given desktop unit. Finally, the last section addresses how individual
users can modify the interface to meet their operational requirements.
This sort of a summary tells the
reader what to expect in the sections that follow. Now she can make an
informed decision: she can read for more detail, or she can move on to
other sections that are more relevant to her.
Summaries also allow you to state the benefits up front to peak the
readers' interest. A summary is the perfect place to articulate your
themes, your selling messages. Each section of your proposal should
bolster the message(s) you want to send to the customer, your "why
select us" pitch.
The summary of a given section should include at least one of the
messages that you have decided will make the customer more inclined to
select your product/service over the other guys'.
The following sections
address the specific features of our software and how users can
customize them to meet their unique requirements. Specifically, this
section addresses how easy it is to use CommonSense to make changes to
the common set of engineering tools distributed throughout the
environment. These simple changes can help reduce the time it takes to
process data while at the same time keeping the system updated.
This section also discusses how to make specific modifications to the
toolset on a given desktop unit. This ability allows the user to
configure the data input to match requirements, which reduces the
amount of time the system administrator has to spend on configuring the
system from incidence to incidence.
Finally, the last section addresses how individual users can make
simple adjustments to modify the interface to meet their operational
requirements. This means each user can format his system according to
his own preference, which will make data input easier and will reduce
the time it takes to perform necessary functions.
Effective proposal summaries not
only tell the reader what they are going to see, but they enumerate the
benefits as well. They entice the evaluator to read on, and give them a
heads-up about the value to them of what they are about to read.
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