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Your clients are more focused than ever on making intelligent supplier choices in the current competitive environment.  You want them to understand that you are the best option for them. Effective proposal writing is key to achieving this.

This workshop give you the key to convincing potential clients that you are the best strategic choice for their business.  You will gain the skills to quickly create more effective business proposals that are customer focused and persuasive.

Attend this highly interactive workshop and benefit by:

• Achieving your selling objectives by aligning your proposals with customer needs and objectives
• Developing a clear, persuasive and appropriate writing style
• Marking your proposal work for a wide range of decision-makers
• Establishing and building rapport with your readers
• Improve your understanding of your proposal by structuring information in ways that are helpful to your customers
• Establishing your credibility by presenting concrete, triangulated evidence
• Producing compelling proposals that are easy to read, easy to understand and easy to act upon

This workshop will provide you with:

• a clear understanding of the purpose of a proposal
• a guide to write a proposal
• Understanding of each segment of the proposal
• a tool to communicate your objectives clearly in writing
• Know-how to write a compelling proposal
• a method to achieve your selling objectives by aligning your proposals with customer needs and objectives.

This workshop will enable you to:

• Understand the relevance of a proposal
• Present a professional proposal
• Articulate each section of a written proposal
• Plan your project clearly
• Understand your projected outcome clearly
• Create a professional impression
• Create your own Proposal Template

COURSE OUTLINE

Introduction and proposal overview

• Providing the background and information to great proposals
• Understanding the concept of writing a winning proposal
• Analyzing your expenses to ensure that profitability of your project

The challenge of great proposal writing

• Understanding what can make a proposal ineffective
• Writing effective proposal by focusing on the clients view point
• Highlighting your value and not cost
• Influencing your client by knowing  various communication tools

Planning for your client and objectives

• Focusing on your clients needs and not yourself
• Understanding your clients:
  • Communication styles
  • Experience
  • Role in the decision-making process
• Determining your proposal objectives

Project Description

• Projecting your desired outcome
• Staffing
• Analyzing resources available to you
• Using your timeline for planning purposes
• Drafting your budget
• Organisational Information

Providing you with tools to write persuasively

• Investigating the structure of persuasion
• Learning how and why decisions are made
• Optimising your proposal to support how people really make decisions
• Establishing credibility with your potential client

Exploring the proposal writing process

• Effectively managing the process
• Understanding the importance of planning
• Prewriting:
  • Collecting and organising information
  • Identifying winning themes
  • Brainstorming your ideas
• Outlining your proposal
• Testing the theme of your proposal
• Analysing information to ensure nothing is missed
• Drafting and revising your proposal

Making Your Proposal Template

• Front Matter
• Executive Summary
• Proposal Body:
  • Presenting your business case
  • Summarising your conclusions
  • Making recommendations
  • Highlighting your solutions and substantiation
• Back Matter
  • Appendices and attachments
  • Glossary and terms
• Other Proposal Types
  • Letter proposals
  • Grant proposals

Writing your proposal

• Overcoming the proposal paradox
• Building a pyramid of information
• Presenting a compelling value proposition
• Customer-focused structure and style
• Effective conclusions
• Recommending action
• Overcoming writer's block

The Executive Summary – your one page proposal

• Determining how to express all the advantages of the proposed project
• Using persuasive language to connect with your audience needs with value added results
• Asking the client to take action
• Good and bad executive summaries
• Creating a great executive summary

Building Readability

• Establishing how clients read documents
• Creating an attractive “look and feel” for your document
• Structuring the page for clarity
• Breaking your document up into readable sections
• Using sentences to signal to the reader
• Using images to convey information
• Presenting statistics and graphs