Writing effective business proposals

Summary

Writing a good business proposal, whether for internal use such as proposing a new project, or for external use, such as winning a new client, are an important part of doing business in the 21st century. While it is true that a good proposal on its own won’t necessarily win you new business, a bad one can certainly lose you business and damage your reputation and credibility.

Writing clearly and succinctly, with supporting facts that are expressed in ways the target audience will understand, will certainly help get the message across and help it get a more positive reception. Alongside that, you need to tell a cohesive story in an appropriate style, without exaggeration, repetition or hyperbole.

This course will primarily focus on internal technical proposals, while discussing the differences between those for internal use and those for external use. We will look at some of the key financial terms that you should be including, what they mean and how to calculate them.

It is important to know your own style, so you will be asked to bring along a recent piece of your work and carry out some objective analysis of it during the day.  

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"When we proofread one another’s proposals now, you can already see there are a lot less comments than their used to be."
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Who should attend?

Anyone who is has to write, approve or present business proposals, whether internally or externally to their company.

Likely job titles would be -

• Engineers, Scientists, Researchers and Technologists
• Project support staff involved in technical roles
• Project Engineers and technical specialists
• Sales Engineers/ Managers
• Managers and supervisors of technical staff. 

How will I benefit?

After the course you will be able to:

• Identify the problem that you are trying to solve
• Put together a good proposal – know what goes in and what stays out
• Use an efficient writing process where you will have a number of contributors
• Tell a cohesive and understandable story, backed up by appropriate facts and figures
• Present the numbers/facts/data in ways that are understandable to non-engineers
• Get the style/language/detail right for your audience  Appreciate the ethical issues in writing proposals  Give accurate financial analysis of your proposal. 

Key topics

• The differences between writing proposals for the Board or for the Client
• The practicalities of writing a proposal and planning to do it efficiently
• Deciding what goes where – structure and format to have a clear message
• How to express numbers in a way that makes an impact on the reader
• Using persuasive language to win support for your argument
• The numbers do not speak for themselves, they must support the story  The bigger picture behind what you are proposing – is it ethically right?  What style/language and level of detail is appropriate?
• The key financial terms such as Return on Investment (ROI), Payback Period etc and how to calculate them. 

Meet our trainers

These trainers regularly teach Writing effective business proposals .