Executive Summaries That Sell Your Proposal

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Executive Summaries That Sell Your Proposal

Executive Summaries That Sell Your Proposal

If you want your clients to read, remember, and respond positively to your proposals, you must first sell them with an Excellent Executive Summary.

Yes, that’s the purpose of the Executive Summary – to sell.

You need to sell your clients on the idea of carefully reading your proposal, understanding the benefits it offers and recognizing the solutions and values it contains.

If your clients are not impressed with your Executive Summary, they will not study your proposal with the attention you expect.

Your Executive Summary, therefore, is the most important part of your proposal.

For the most part, it should not be longer than one page.
Executive Summaries That Sell Your Proposal:

Build Credibility

You build credibility by focusing on what your client will see as the result of granting you the order.

Your Executive Summary must reveal a clearly defined vision of a successful business relationship.

You accomplish this when your Executive Summary allows your clients to see and hear words and ideas that are familiar to them. They should be familiar because you listened extremely well to your clients; you studied their situation, and have dissected the structure of their RFP.

Your Executive Summaries should leave your clients with the Feeling that they will be making an intelligent decision if they work with you.

In other words, your Executive Summaries appeal to your clients’ Intellectually and Emotionally.

Your Executive Summary creates a comfort factor as well as credibility.

This may be the most important quality of the Executive Summary

Set you apart from the competition

If you fill your Executive Summary with boilerplate pollution and your competitors do the same, that puts you in the same canoe with everyone else.

You can set yourself apart from your competitors by:

1.  Creating a clear, concise, complete, correct, and conversational Executive Summary.

2.  Exceeding your client’s expectations. What can you offer your client that your competitors can’t, won’t, or never thought of?

3.  Challenging your clients’ beliefs. Your clients may envision a solution to their problems coming from what they know about your competitors’ products or services. Provide them with a fresher, better, more tangible vision.

Prepare your clients for the reading style and pace of the rest of the proposal.

When you answer the phone, most of the time, you answer the phone, “Hello,” or you give your name.

Do you know how or why the whole “hello” thing started?

Saying “Hello” is an opportunity for the person at the other end of the line to become accustomed to the sound, volume, tone, and rhythm of your voice.

Your Executive Summary can do a similar thing for the style, rhythm, and pace of your proposal.

Make sure you write your Executive Summary in a conversational tone. Do not burden your client with an academic assignment.

Prove that you understand your customer’s situation.

Your Executive Summary previews the content of your proposal.

If your clients feel your Executive Summary is nothing more than a commercial for your business, your clients will never read your proposal.

Your Executive Summary needs to relive your clients’ pain or need and then clearly and graphically reveal what they will see, feel, and experience as a result of your offering.

Preview your unique solution to the customer’s needs.

Even if your products or services are exactly the same as your competitors, you need to come up with a unique selling proposition that creates a customer who wants to do business with you.

I’m sure by listening to your customers, by doing the research, by focusing on their needs, and maybe by using words from their boilerplate pollution on their website, you should be able to create a unique solution.

For example, you may not now offer 24-hour telephone support.

This might be something neither your client nor your competitor even considered.

If your pre-proposal investigation uncovers this concept, you might offer it as your unique sales proposition.

If the client is that important and the ROI clearly warrants it, go for it.

How To Test the Power of Your Executive Summary

If you feel confident your Executive Summaries represents you well, run it through a taste test.

Let someone or a group of people unfamiliar with your products or services, your clients, or even your industry read your Executive Summary.

If they can read it quickly and easily; if they understand that it offers reasonable ideas; if they say something like, “Sounds good to me,” the chances are pretty high that you’ve got a winner.

If they have to ask you a lot of questions, you might want to rethink your approach.

If your “Review Board” doesn’t understand your words, your clients might feel the same way.

It’s Ginzu Knife time.

As a thank you for reading this article, you win!

If your send me up to 10 pages of your best Proposal Writing, I will review it, edit it, and return it to you with a written report on what you did well and what I suggest you change.

Is that a deal or what?

No Charge!

I want to prove to you that my system works and I can show you and your sales team that they can learn these concepts to help them make more money.

E-mail me your proposal sample of up to 5 pages to al@alborowski.com.

Make sure you put the Subject Line: Proposal Checklist

Remember. No more than 10 pages.

E-mail me your proposal sample at al@alborowski.com.

Subject Line: Proposal Checklist