Before you begin writing your proposal, you want to have a clear understanding of the results you want from your proposal. This article will address the general business proposals that are used in every day businesses.

Some of the basic pieces of information all proposals should contain include:

1. What is the reason for doing this project?
2. What is your role in this project?
3. How will you carry out your responsibilities?
4. Where will this project be done?
5. Approximately how long will this project take to complete?
6. What is the total cost of the project?

These are just general questions that you should use for some kind of guidance in creating your proposals. There is not one specific format that every business has to use, but instead all good proposals will follow this general format.

Your proposal should also include an executive summary. This is often considered the most important part of the proposal. It is often the number one factor for the reader’s first impression. Your executive summary should be written last after you have written down all of the details and answered all of the above questions. When you write your executive summary last, you’ll be sure to include all important details that you have answered beforehand. It will be easier for you to include all key points.

Your executive summary is a brief description of the entire project and includes objectives, implementation and details the outcome of the entire project. Your executive summary should be no more than about 700 words and should cover one page.

Next another section to be covered is called “Need”. Need is a very detailed description of the current business problem and why it is important that it be addressed. In this section you want to use everything you can to support your information. This includes statistics from documented sources. You also want to detail the importance of the project to the overall health and vitality of the business. Here, you also want to include timelines.

In the next section, you should include Objectives. Here, in this section you’ll want to write out the expected or projected outcomes of the project. Be sure to write this in terms that can be tracked and measured. In the Objectives section, you’ll be showing what you will do for your client or business, how much and by what date and time. After the completion of the project, you will be able to evaluate the project based upon this section and be able to prove whether you’ve succeeded or not. In this section, you also want to identify long term as well as short term objectives.

Method section is one of the longest parts of the proposal. It can also be one of the most crucial parts. In this section, you’ll detail a complete plan of action for how the objectives will be accomplished. You’ll start writing out your overall approach to the situation and how it is relevant. Next, you’ll detail your methods and also how anticipated problems will be managed by you.

Evaluation will describe how your prospect will be able to know if the project has been accomplished to satisfaction. Here you will also describe plans for collecting additional pieces of information on how to improve the overall project. Here you also want to include what the purpose of evaluation is and what pieces of information will be gathered.

So here you have it. Writing proposals can be a very complex thing or a very simple thing. It all depends on the business situation. One thing for sure, you want your proposal to win you the sale or the business of your customer. Keep that in mind, when you are writing your future proposals.

source: http://www.captureplanning.com/!hc_how_to_write_a_proposal.cfm

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