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Making proposal writing faster and easier

You need to speed up what you actually spend the most time doing

When you have been blessed get stuck with a proposal assignment or decide to pursue a bid where you’ll be doing most or all of the work yourself, it’s natural to look for ways to make it easier. Here are seven things you need to do to successfully complete your proposal assignment and what you need to make them happen. After that, we explain our approach to make doing those things easier so that you can quickly complete your assignment and deliver a winning proposal.

To successfully complete your assignment you need to:

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Faster

Most of the time spent on a proposal is spent thinking. It is spent gathering information and figuring out what to do with it. It is spent discovering what it will take to win and then figuring out how to get the words on paper to achieve it. If you are spending the majority of your time re-writing, it’s because you didn’t spend enough time thinking.

Since this is where you spend the most time, this is where you should focus in order to make it easier. If you focus on formatting, production, or automation, you may make some things easier, but you’ll be missing out on your biggest opportunities. To make your proposal assignment easier you need the right information and some guidance for converting it into copy for your proposal. To get them, you need:

If you have the perspective of a proposal manager, you are probably thinking about ways to extend your process so that in addition to giving assignments, you deliver what the authors will need to complete them successfully.

But if you have the perspective of someone who is working on their own to complete a proposal or an assignment, you don’t want a process that serves everybody else’s needs, you just want to get started and complete your work. What you need to make your assignment easier is the same process, only you need to approach it differently. For someone just trying to get a proposal done, what you need is to treat the process steps as a checklist. Instead of going through things methodically, one at a time, while documenting each step so you can coordinate with others and manage expectations, what you need is to be able to see the considerations as a list of ingredients. You need to be able to preserve the inspiration while combining all the steps.

If you have the perspective of a business owner, then you should put something like this into place early. That will lay the foundation so that as you grow, you can turn the checklists into steps in a process with multiple participants. If you wait until you have multiple participants to build the foundation, you will lose proposals while you struggle to get everyone on the same page.

 

 

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More information about "Carl Dickson"

Carl Dickson

Carl is the Founder and President of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY

Carl is an expert at winning in writing, with more than 30 year's experience. He's written multiple books and published over a thousand articles that have helped millions of people develop business and write better proposals. Carl is also a frequent speaker, trainer, and consultant and can be reached at carl.dickson@captureplanning.com. To find out more about him, you can also connect with Carl on LinkedIn.

Click here to learn how to engage Carl as a consultant.

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