Writing Business Bids and Proposals For Dummies

Chapter 13

Using Tools and Templates to Accelerate Your Proposals

IN THIS CHAPTER

Choosing tools to help you throughout the proposal process

Using templates to keep your proposal on track

When you’ve been writing proposals for a while, you find that you do a lot of rework. From deal to deal — small or large, simple or complex — you’ll find yourself performing a task, sending a reminder, training a newbie, describing a product, or defending an action, and you’ll say to yourself, “I’ve been here before.”

It’s therefore reasonable to seek a way to avoid these constant, mundane repetitions and focus your energy on making a difference to each new and vitally important deal.

Whether you’re experienced or just starting out, commercially or governmentally focused, you need a suite of tools to help you win more business through proposals. These tools may be as fundamental as a single laptop with word-processing software and an Internet connection. They may be as straightforward as a set of home-grown templates that streamline your page layout. Or they may be as sophisticated as an end-to-end Request for Proposal (RFP) response management system that serves hundreds of concurrent users. Tools are necessary for every proposal writer because you simply have too much work to accomplish without help.

Because new proposal and project management tools come out all the time, you need to understand the different approaches these tools take for enhancing your efforts during the proposal process. ...