How to Write Reports and Proposals

Create Attention-Grabbing Documents that Achieve Your Goals

Patrick Forsyth

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749487201
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Writing
• Index: Business

How to Write Reports and Proposals is essential reading for achieving effective writing techniques. Getting a message across on paper and presenting a proposal in a clear and persuasive form are vital skills for anyone in business, and this book provides practical advice on how to impress, convince and persuade your colleagues or clients.Fully updated for 2019, this 5th edition now features even more practical exercises, useful templates, and top tips that will help you to write succinctly and with impact across different media. How to Write Reports and Proposals will give you the tools to put over a good case with style. The Creating Success series of books...
Unlock vital skills, power up your performance and get ahead with the bestselling Creating Success series. Written by experts for new and aspiring managers and leaders, this million-selling collection of accessible and empowering guides will get you up to speed in no time. Packed with clever thinking, smart advice and the kind of winning techniques that really get results, you'll make fast progress, quickly reach your goals and create lasting success in your career.

06

Making proposals persuasive

Reports can be a chore to write and a trial to get right. But proposals are a different matter, writing them makes some additional demands. How do they differ from reports? In many ways they have all the same qualities. They must earn a reading, they must hold and develop interest. They must use many of the devices already mentioned – being well structured and using language appropriately, for instance – but there is more. They must persuade, they must actively work to obtain positive decisions to do business. As such, they are a key stage in the buying/selling process, and, although this is not the place for a complete description of sales techniques, some factors are important.

A cumulative process

Selling may sometimes be a simple process consisting of one meeting. The sales person meets the buyer and, at the end of the meeting – if it has been successful – the buyer agrees to purchase and the deal is done.

Often though the process of selling something is much more complicated than this. For example, the chain of events might include the following transactions:

• Advertising and promotional activity prompt an enquiry from a prospective customer.
• That enquiry has to be handled (on the telephone, let us assume).
• The prospect is interested and asks for details to be posted (a letter and catalogue, say).
• Nothing more may be heard, but a telephone call is initiated to revive, maintain or develop the initial interest.
• At this point it may be agreed that a sales person visits to discuss matters in more detail.
• A sales meeting takes place; inconclusively.
• Follow up is again made by telephone and another meeting takes place.
• A second meeting is conducted and this time the prospect agrees to consider a proposal – ‘Let’s see chapter and verse in writing.’
• Once submitted, the proposal may be distributed to others around the organization.
• More chasing may be necessary, and then the potential supplier is short listed.
• Next a formal presentation is requested and made (say to the Board, or a buying committee).
• A decision to purchase (or not) is finally made.

The process might not be so drawn out, but in some cases even the example above might be a simplification. More meetings may be necessary. Certain industries demand additional stages such as a demonstration or test. And every stage, however many there are, is a form of communication. The whole process may last days, weeks, months or even years; certainly every organization has its own version of this persuasive sequence.

Now, with the kind of complexity above (and that of your own organization in mind) consider this: in terms of quality of action the process is cumulative. Prospective buyers only move from one stage to the next if they have been satisfied by the quality of what has been done to date. Thus, for example, if you send inappropriate or shoddy literature it will be more difficult to tie down a meeting.

There is another consideration here: that of strike rate. Moving right through the stages is time-consuming and expensive. Any stage poorly executed risks the process stopping there. The customer declines to continue the process (he or she may well be checking out competitors in parallel, and will continue with them) and all the time and money expended to date is wasted.

A key stage

Something of the above continuity may be true for reports also, but it is certainly very pronounced with proposals. Proposals are literally a key link in the stages of moving prospects from little or no interest in your product or service to that where they take willing, positive action to buy. What is more they are a link that comes towards the end of the sequence. By that point too much has often been done for sales to be willingly allowed to fall through by default because of poor proposals.

There is therefore a great deal hanging on proposals and they must do their job well. A proposal must not, therefore, be simply efficient and readable – it must be persuasive. Somehow, in many organizations, written proposals are something of a weak link. Whatever the quality of face-to-face salesmanship, it always seems to be less when something intended to be persuasive is put in writing. At worst, over-formality – often coupled with too much circumspection – dilutes the level of persuasiveness achieved.

Persuasive technique

As was said at the start of this chapter, this is no place for a complete run down on what constitutes sales technique. However, it is worth digressing briefly to consider certain essentials.

The best, and simplest, definition of selling that I know is that selling is ‘helping people to buy’. This positions the whole process that demands that the seller identifies, understands and respects the buyer’s needs, and makes their case act to facilitate the buyer’s making a decision to buy.

Essentially selling has three tasks. To:

• create visibility (no one will buy from you if they do not know, or remember, you);
• be persuasive (make what you say understandable, attractive and credible);
• differentiate (to make your case more powerful and distinctive than those of competitors).
• All are important and often, with business justifying or necessitating a proposal stage, the third is especially so. It should never be assumed that business is not threatened by competition even when (with repeat business, for instance) this is neither in evidence nor mentioned.

The don’ts

You should not:

• Be too clever. It is the argument that should win the reader round, not your flowery phrases, elegant quotations or clever approach.
• Be too complicated. The point about simplicity has been made. It applies equally to the overall argument.
• Be pompous. This means saying too much about you, your organization and your product/services (instead of what it means to the reader). It means writing in a way that is too far removed from the way you would speak. It means following too slavishly the exact grammar at the expense of an easy, flowing style.
• Over-claim. While you should certainly have the courage of your convictions, too many superlatives can become self-defeating. Make one claim that seems doubtful and the whole argument will suffer.
• Offer opinions. Or at least not too many compared with the statement of facts, ideally substantiated facts.
• Lead into points with negatives. For example, do not say ‘If this is not the case we will…’, rather ‘You will find… or…’
• Assume your reader lacks knowledge. Rather than saying, for example, ‘You probably do not know that…’ better to say ‘Many people have not yet heard…’ or ‘Like others, you probably know…’
• Overdo humour. Never use humour unless you are very sure of its success. An inward groan as the prospect reads does rather destroy the nodding agreement you are trying to build. A quotation or quip, particularly if it is relevant, is safer and even if the humour is not appreciated, the appropriateness may be noted.
• Use up benefits early. A persuasive case must not run out of steam: it must end on a high note and still be talking in terms of benefits even towards and at the end.

The dos

You should do the following:

• Concentrate on facts. The case you put over must be credible and factual. A clear-cut ‘these are all the facts you need to know’ approach tends to pay particular dividends.
• Use captions. While pictures, illustrations, photographs and charts can often be regarded as speaking for themselves, they will have more impact if used with a caption. (This can be a good way of achieving acceptable repetition, with a mention in the text and in the caption.)
• Use repetition. Key points can appear more than once, for example in a leaflet and an accompanying letter, even more than once within the letter itself. This applies, of course, especially to benefits repeated for emphasis.
• Keep changing the language. You need to find numbers of ways of saying the same thing in brochures and letters and so on.
• Say what is new. Assuming you have something new, novel – even unique – to say, make sure the reader knows it. Real different...