Speaker: John Posada

Meeting notes by: Brenda Orbell

Brenda Orbell completed her Ph.D. in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University in December and is working as a consultant in technical communication.

Five-step process for creating proposals
Posada's process for writing proposals included five major steps.

1. Planning the Proposal The most significant step in planning a proposal is determining how your company can meet the minimum requirements of the customer's selection criteria. To keep the customer from eliminating your bid, every risk must be mitigated.

2. Developing the Proposal Strategy The second step involves four critical actions: understanding the problem the customer seeks to resolve; identifying the discriminators that differentiate you from competitors; prioritizing the discriminators to emphasize the strengths of your solution and weaknesses of competitors' solutions; and defining the price so that it reflects a price-conscious solution or a total value package.

3. Formulating the Proposal Strategy For each issue identified in the planning stage, you need to write a strategy statement that indicates how you are going to convince the customer to choose your proposal. The fundamental goal of your proposal strategy should be to boost your credibility (emphasize your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses) and attack the competition (highlight your competitions' weaknesses and downplay their strengths).

4. Developing the Proposal Format When developing the proposal format for prospective customers, you need to include information that will assure them that you are capable of defining and implementing the appropriate solution. With existing customers, you must consider if and how your past performance should be addressed in the current proposal.

5. Writing the Proposal Regardless of the information in the proposal, it should address at least four areas:
   • executive material (an introduction, a problem statement, a statement that says how the solution resolves the problem, information about your company, and an overview of the proposal)

   • management material (an executive summary, a description of the benefit of the product or service, and a plan for implementing it)

   • technical material (a description of the service or product being offered as a solution to the customer's problem)

   • financial material (analyses of the cost of the proposed solution, the cost of the current problem and how the solution will reduce this cost, and any creative pricing structure)

You can obtain a PowerPoint file of Posada's charts by sending an email request to john@twandw.com. Posada's web site at www.twandw.com includes many resources for technical communicators.