Keep It Crisp

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

 

No project manager in his (or her) right mind will dispute the value of a short, crisply written proposal. The reasons are obvious. If you do your job properly, odds are excellent you’ll get the deal. All your research, development, building, analyzing and testing phases should rapidly fall into place, cutting implementation time down dramatically, maybe by half, asserts Len Pagon, president and CEO of Brulant, Inc., an e-business consulting firm in Cleveland.

Brief and Full of Impact

Pagon boasts that his firm’s win rate for professional services proposals, for example, is more than 80 percent. If you’re selling to senior executives, for example, proposals must be brief and full of impact, he says.

“Time and speed are everything in how you sell,” Pagon says. “Potential prospects are looking for shortcuts. The shorter the proposal, the better. But, short proposals, three to four pages, are only successful if they are an overview and a condensed version of what follows. They present compelling facts which will be expanded later. Yet, short proposals are harder to write than long ones because all the critical facts must be condensed into a few pages.”

It means having the backup material and appendices stakeholders want to see in the initial stages of a project.

“A lot of people are involved in the decision-making process,” says Pagon. “You have to win them over …

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