Writing a proposal without formal and informal reviews is as absurd as making a blockbuster movie without dailies and other review meetings to scrutinize every camera angle or editing decisions. Just like in the film industry, missing a key detail or making a continuity mistake undermines your credibility in the eyes of the audience. It can outright ruin the impression you want to make with just a few gaffes, or even open you up to ridicule.
Everyone struggles with proposal writing—even proposal veterans. But when it comes to subject matter experts, it gets even worse. Here are ten things to avoid doing while writing proposals – with some suggestions on how to improve your writing experience and, of course, produce winning results.
Your proposal’s overall professional look and feel has a lot to do with presenting you as a credible and reliable company to your prospective customers. Even the best possible solution, presented it in a sloppy manner, may plant the seeds of doubt in your evaluators’ minds.
Another tool of proposal persuasion is graphics. Graphics will always prevail over text. Quite simply, they are infinitely more effective at presenting the marketing and sales message. You wouldn’t even fathom not using graphics when you put together a marketing or sales brochure. Yet, people routinely underuse graphics in proposals.
It is important to define that for proposal purposes, graphics or visuals are not just pretty graphs and flowcharts or photos. Instead, they are all the visual elements that break up the monotony of the text. A visual could be a figure, a text or a focus box, or a nicely rendered table.
