Writing Business Proposals

In business, it is essential to persuade your client that you offer exactly what he requires. Irrespective of the size of business, it is important to make client aware about your skill areas both with verbal and written communication. In business to business scenarios, the client is not a one person rather it will be a team of experts and similarly there will be competitor companies capable to offer same services.

Business proposals are the documents written to create a case of client’s requirement mapped with your offerings. There might be two reasons to send proposals to your client:

1) Client sends RFP Request for proposal

2) You know client's current way of working and associated pain points that you can address with you solution

The chances of your proposal getting approved depends on how well you have put your points and how competitive it is in terms of charges as well as quality.

Create a business story starting with attractive punch line or slogan. Like every other written document, this should also be interesting. The proposal should highlight your strength areas e.g. experience in delivering similar solutions to various organizations across geographies.

It should focus on client's pain points and specialty of your solution with respect to competition. Focus on client's actual problems and needs rather than the requirements he has written in the document. Many times, they don’t even know what is causing them problem and how it can be solved in a better way.

Two years ago, when I got a business requirement document from one of my client and after analyzing I realized that there could be better ways to work on his current problem. I called him up and asked do you exactly want the same way you have asked in your RFP? He said, 'Yes'. I along with one of my senior worked on the proposal on the same lines. We have finalized our proposal and send it to him. Later we got to know that ours was rejected as they didn’t want the same and they got some better solution from one of our competitor.

Give them the key points and enable them to compare you with your competitors e.g. write about your quality, the time-frame in which you will deliver the service, the cost that will be competitive the additional features and ease of use.

Don't bluff the client, rather provide the concrete information about you previous success while delivering similar services.

Create a good balance between the technical details of the approach you are going to adopt.  Too little will confuse him and he will doubt your capability to deliver; too much of sharing might enable client to get his own team work on that and develop the solution on his own. Though there are less evidences of the later but still it happens.

It’s good to have a cost benefit analyze if your service is going to replace the existing one. Provide the actual data to back your points.

Create sections for important information, attach logo of your organization, prepare the template and get it reviewed from your senior. Create all the proposal documents in the same format. It will help client to understand and remember the key things.

Template must have below sections:

- Title

This section should have the name of the document, RFP number if any, date, Author.

- Index

If the document is below 5 pages, it is not necessary to have index but in case of big documents do include the index so that reader can directly get to his area of interest.

- Analysis of requirement or problem

This section should have thorough analysis of current pain points the user is having.

- Proposed solution

The approach should be clearly stated to give confidence to your client. Remember too much detail is risky to have.

- Cost benefit analysis
The estimated cost versus the benefits of having the solution implemented should be provided in detail. This section draws most of the attention so should be reviewed properly.

- Miscellaneous

This section should have information about licenses, patents etc. and other infrastructure required to be in place to implement you proposed solution.

Seeds of thoughts:

You are a team leader in a software company and ‘Manufacture India’ a manufacturing company wants to tracks its employees’ coming and leaving time along with attendance and duration inside office premises etc. You have one product 'Attendance Management System' but it lacks some of the features ‘Manufacture India’ wants however have some more features that are not required. You know some competitor companies also have similar software product. Write the proposal to persuade your client to buy your software.

- Amit Roop