The purpose of this book is to provide you with a practical guide to writing and organizing sales proposals. Whether you are a novice or senior proposal writer, you will find tips and techniques that will be beneficial to you. Instead of discussing salesmanship 101, sales theories, and proposal war stories, this book focuses on developing a process for writing winning proposals.
A process may be defined as a method for achieving results that involves a number of identifiable steps and operations. For a process to be successful, it must be repeatable-otherwise it is not a process as such and any results are only accidental. Being able to win proposals consistently is not accidental; it is the result of utilizing a well-planned process (and having a good product helps!). This book defines the basic steps that are a part of that process.
Having an easily applied process reduces wasted time spent in the mechanical aspects of coordinating a variety of disparate materials. Instead, you can devote time to a better understanding the RFP, developing a winning strategy, getting the right pricing, and working with the customer.
This is the third edition of this book. While the basic principals of good proposalmanship haven’t changed, technology has given us new tools that allow us to work better and smarter. Current desktop technologies allow the small to average user to produce a proposal that will compete on any level.
One of the major advances in proposal writing is the Internet. With the Internet, individuals and companies can easily share files, access boilerplate caches, collaborate in the development of a proposal, and create a virtual proposal center where suchimportant items as the proposal strategy, competitive information, and answers to questions can be posted. This allows the team to be geographically dispersed and work regardless of the place and the time zone. For the more technologically advanced, computer teleconferencing and on-line whiteboards add to the tool bag.
This book is useful not only as a writing guide, but as a resource itself to show management how professional proposals are resourced, managed, and written. These ideas and others are explored in this new edition. But, the tried and true principles of writing a good proposal remain, regardless of technology. (text from the publisher)