Proposals can be onerous with tight deadlines and turnarounds. But like with any client document, consistency and quality are vital. Early proposal planning and involvement are essential to achieving a consistent and quality result.
Client expectations are ever-increasing regarding proposals, which means meeting and exceeding them. Presenting the client with quality documents makes you more competitive, and applying staged reviews gives you the best chance of achieving quality outputs.
TIP: What are the typical things comprising consistent content and formatting?
Project names used consistently throughout the document; Consistent spelling, punctuation and grammar; Consistent heading, line and font sizes; Consistent use of branding with logos, colours and diagrams.
When working on a proposal, contributors are often too close to the content and solution to identify gaps, areas of improvement or inconsistency. Staged reviews allow you to continually refine your response – putting you in the best position to win.
Reviews help ensure the proposal delivers against the agreed winning strategy and themes and brings broader experience and thinking to challenge and strengthen the client offering. Reviews help track progress but, most of all, ensure you have a compliant, client-focused, and compelling proposal.
TIP: Create a knowledge repository to store information gathered during proposal planning and ensure consistent writing.
