Customers assume a proposal represents your best effort. If they find errors, they may doubt the accuracy of the rest of the proposal.Proposals go through several iterations and reviews before final submission to the customer. Each iteration ensures your document is clear, concise, and correct. Don’t underestimate the editing process. Build time into your schedule to ensure all reviews can be performed, that proofreading and revising are given enough space to be thorough.

As a writer, I often get the urge to sit at my keyboard and get to the good stuff—the writing. Most of the time, I’d like to just dive in and forget about all that tedious planning that always seems to take so much precious time when I could actually just do the writing...

A new year brings greater emphasis on what we need to improve in ourselves. For many in the proposal writing world, you may not need a complete overhaul of your proposal practices to start writing more effectively and winning more business. Often, a simple refresh of the basics will sharpen your edges and improve your overall proposal writing.So, what are the basics of proposal writing? Oddly enough, some of them don’t involve writing at all.

For some people, efficiency is synonymous with speed. Sometimes there is very little time from when the RFP drops to the submission deadline, and this means the proposal team must work very hard and very quickly to prepare a proposal for submission. However, efficiency is not just doing things as quickly as possible. It is also about doing things right the first time, so you do not waste time on rework.

Toward the end of the year, people tend to spend a lot of time planning. Some may plan gifts for family and friends. Some plan how they will maximize what is left of the corporate budget for the year. Others begin to plan what they want their personal goals for the next year to be. Whatever type of plans are on your mind right now, it is hard to deny the importance of having a plan and adhering to it.

Planning is especially important when developing a proposal. Planning efforts should begin before writers ever begin typing, and it should carry the proposal writing and editing through to submission. Even when limited time is available, taking the time to plan proposal development will save you valuable time.

Proposal planning and proposal writing are not mortal enemies. They can and should be the best of friends...

When writing proposals, it is important to remember all the aspects that make a winning proposal. Some key techniques are things like incorporating customer focus throughout the proposal...

Some best practices in proposal writing, improve your writing and your win rate by applying these seven rules

To write proposals effectively, writers need a lot of information. They must know the customer, including their hot buttons, and they must know your bid strategy...this information is not always given to proposal writers, which makes the proposal development slow and confusing. Giving writers the necessary information and advising them what to do with it creates more winning proposals.

Writer’s block is a LIE.This is a lie we tell ourselves to feel better about our current circumstances. Giving the condition a diagnosis seems to calm us down or give us a reason for our fears, our inferiorities. Sure, this sounds real and the words feel blocked in our head, and they’re clearly not coming out onto the page. So what else could it be?