Last week I took on a quick-turnaround assignment -- helping a new client with a commercial (B2B) proposal. I don't often do these, but I had some extra time on my hands so I agreed to work on it.
My client had apparently given this assignment initially to another writer, although I'm not sure if this was someone on his staff or someone he hired. At any rate, he didn't really like what this writer had given him. So he wanted me to fix it up. He also wanted me to use a proposal template that he had purchased a while back, and which had cost a pretty penny. It's unclear to me why he hadn't given this template to the original writer.
At first I didn't like the template, but as I started working with it, I found that it was really a jazzed up version of one of my favorite free guides from the Edward Lowe Foundation entitled How to Write a Sales Proposal. This guide, which is basically a template for creating a business proposal, takes you step-by-step through the major components of the proposal. It uses examples and incorporates workspace for you to write your own verbage.
The difference between the free template and the one I received from my client is that the latter is already formatted so that when you are done filling in the details of your proposal, you basically have a finished product. And it's quite nice looking. But it's a MS Word template based on styles. And if you don't know how to use styles, you could waste a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with all that formatting, particularly if you don't follow the template exactly.
In this case, what I did was to take what had already been written and chop it up into discrete chunks of information under some new subheadings I created in the template. I then did a lot of editing and reorganizing of the material so that it flowed in a logical fashion. I also created some new major sections and incorporated some additional information that my client had sent to me. I'm basically done with it, with the exception of a few small things that I need to address this morning. Then I'll e-mail it off to my client for his review.
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