Deborah's Proposal Writing Blog

My ideal client is a company or organization that wants to work with me as a team. In my view, proposal development has got to be a team effort, whether or not you use the services of a consultant. And it's particularly important when you do hire a consultant. Unless the consultant knows your organization very very well, he or she cannot prepare your proposal in a vacuum. A proposal must reflect the organization's mission, philosophy, and way of doing things -- not the consultant's philosophy or what the consultant thinks might be the way the organization should do things. If you leave it to the consultant to figure things out for you, you could be in big trouble down the road once you finally get around to reading the proposal and/or if you happen to win the project.

When doing a proposal with a client, teamwork means joint planning, holding discussions, asking and answering questions, providing and using one another's inputs, rendering assistance when needed, and jointly engaging in problem-solving. It doesn't mean that you have to be physically together every day or even talk every day. But both the client and consultant must make themselves available to one another to achieve their mutual objective of developing the best possible proposal.

More often than I would expect, I'm contacted by prospective clients who want me to just write the proposal for them -- by myself -- without knowing anything about their company or the way their company would approach the project they want to bid on. They just want to hand the proposal over to someone else, with little or no involvement on their part. I don't have to think twice about turning these types of assignments down. If teamwork isn't part of your vocabulary, then I'm not the right consultant for you.