Writing Winning Business Proposals, Third Edition, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 3Aligning the Baseline Logic

This is the most difficult, perhaps the longest, and arguably the most important chapter in the book. If you skip this chapter, you won’t understand fully most of the book’s subsequent content. So find some blocks of time during which you’re not distracted, and forge on.

Why is this the most important chapter? First, because the baseline logic, introduced in Chapter 2, is the foundation of your proposal, and more than 95 percent of the proposals I’ve read, over the course of 30 years, have serious flaws in the baseline logic, causing serious cracks in their foundations. Second, this chapter demonstrates how you can fully align the baseline logic, as shown in Figure 3.1, and thereby:

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