Writing Proposals to Win

We are big believer’s in the PSMJ camp of writing proposals to WIN! Crafting a compelling persuasive proposal is not easy and it takes commitment and focus to make sure all of the pieces are as benefit and client and RFP focused as we can make it. We do use a proposal template, but it is highly customized to the opportunity. 

The cover letter is often written from whole cloth, although sometimes we will take a good previous cover letter for the same project type, and modify it to be super precise and targeted. We obsess over small details - choice of photos, fonts, CV and reference project accuracy, spell checking, and of course the fees and costs.  

Very often Ward is writing proposals for Comms, Security and Audiovisual. Our Hotel proposals usually have a lot of travel that is required, so we have developed various spreadsheet costing and analysis tools to determine the fees and costs. The Hotel proposals all require a breakdown of reimbursable expenses by discipline and phase, for a project that will have a minimum 4-year time frame, which often stretches out to 6+ years.

Although it is a necessary evil, responding to public procurement RFP’s is a sure-fire race to the bottom, where we do not have the legal space to differentiate ourselves.

Additional Service Requests (ASR’s):

This is the easiest new work to get - as long as the client likes us!  On a number of our larger jobs, ASR’s sometimes represent 50% (or more) incremental revenue on the base job.  The important aspect of this is to make ourselves indispensable and valuable to the Client so that they realize the value.  The ability to sell ASR’s is just as important as selling any new work – it must be benefit and value based.

As we all know, it is 7 times harder to get work from a new client than from an existing one.