Proposals
Table of Contents
Purpose
The following are actionable tactics to improve the ROI of time spent writing proposals.
Scope
Covers principles and process for finding and writing proposals at Countable. The author is most experienced writing proposals for the public sector.
Principles
- The process starts before you start writing. You want to make sure the odds are stacked in your favour before you invest in writing anything.
- Specialize! Choose similar projects, so you can re-use bits of old proposals that worked. It’s better to solve the same problem really well than to spread yourself thin. Choose an RFP in an area where you have the most expertise, similar work (including successes to highlight), and have a network of people in that area.
- Countable’s niches are web maps, healthcare and optimizing citizen flows for government.
- Use your network’s experience, and team up. If you know someone who would be really great to add to your team, write them into the proposal too, and give them a small cut just for being present, even if they do very little work.
- Score before you Send. Get someone who understands the client to evaluate your proposal and give you a score based on the official criteria before you submit.
- Ask questions to qualify or disqualify the project, before writing.
- Your questions should increase trust, fill in blanks, and unearth hidden needs behind the RFP. Find out the truth about whether you can knock it out of the park.
- Examples: “Would you consider a team outside your industry who can bring fresh ideas, or prefer a firm with lots of industry experience?”
- Keep the proposal as short as possible while addressing the criteria and building trust.
Continue to review the Proposal Writing Process
Specific Proposal Types:
Bidding Against ERPs
Often, we are proposing a Django based project as a more flexible, cheaper, faster and more maintainable alternative to an ERP implementation (Enterprise Resource Planning).
Here are some problems with ERPs that we solve for our clients:
- It takes an average of 11 months after go-live for SMBs to realize benefits from an ERP [1], whereas our implementations typically realize benefits in 6 to 8 weeks due to our rapid prototyping approach in the first 2 weeks.
- In an ERP usage survey, only 14 of 287 respondents reported realizing the benefits of “Upgrading Technology” with an ERP, and 34 of 150 respondents realized the “Growth”-related goals they had when implementing ERP. ERP were more effective at realizing “Operational Efficiency” goals, however with 103 of 122 respondents reporting success.
- Regarding ERPs “Of those organizations that have completed implementation, less than half (45%) experienced budget overruns. However, those that did experience overruns were an average of 24% over budget. Whenyou’re talking about an implementation budget, 24% is a lot of money. On average, organizations reported an expected budget of $1,007,767 and an actual budget of $1,247,859.” [1]
[1] 2019 ERP Report, Panoram Consulting Solutions.