Business Proposal Template
Reading the request for proposal (RFP) is the starting point for deciding upon the structure of a good quality business proposal template. You need to be aware of the fact that your proposal should answer all the questions details in the RFP while still highlighting the benefits of using your firm. As a result, a simplified proposal structure can often be the most beneficial.
It really only needs two sections. The first section should be your executive summary. This is where you explicitly spell out the benefits of using your company for delivering whatever profitable business ideas the company/customer has. This synopsis should also answer many of the critical questions that were detailed in the RFP. This section is critical as some initial reviews of your proposal may stop at this point if you haven’t answered each of the critical questions they had (especially when several proposals have been received).
The second section is your supporting data. Think of this as all the backup information required to support the claims you made in the synopsis section. It should have details about what needs to be done, action plans, cost estimates, delivery schedules, monitoring techniques, resourcing requirements, management techniques to be used, milestones and payment expectations.
This section can become very detailed so you have to be careful to summarize information. A good idea is actually to include appendices which your document for any really detailed financial information, graphs or charts and simply reference these back in the supporting sections.
Finally, it is critical to be constantly reviewing your business proposal template against the evaluation criteria. Most RFPs include these criteria so you can base your proposal on the different scoring structure. This assesses your proposal against what questions have been answered, benefits highlighted, etc. Your own reviews should however also try to limit the amount of useless information included in the proposal. Always be mindful that your customer will have several proposals to read.