Letter Proposal Format
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, 20 February 2008 |
|
The letter formats outlined below are similar to most business proposals offered today; you can use them as example for learning. Your proposals should be fairly short, though; if you make them too long, people will skim them and miss some of your more important points.
Letter proposals can be from one to five pages long, but I’ve found the best length is two to three pages. That is long enough so that the client knows you’ve considered your proposal carefully, but not so long that the client feels you are trying too hard to get his or her business.
- Brief Description. States in one sentence the purpose of the proposal. For example ,” This is a proposal to develop a waterproof barrier for Spa Covers, hot tub, and spa foam core covers”
- Current Situation. Explain the client’s or prospective partner’s situation that your proposal is responding to. In the case of a joint cooperation or partnership proposal, explain your situation as well. This section provides information about the current situation and why the current situation is creating problems, needs, or opportunities.
- Goals. State here the goals of the client or partners as they relate to the problem or opportunity. The goals should relate to what the client or partner has told you, as well as corresponding to the results you can actually achieve. For example, a hospital’s problems might be that it takes too long to record patient information and that too often information is inaccurate. The hospital’s goal might be to reduce the time spent recording a patients information from 15 to 10 minutes and to have 95% of the reports error-free. If you can meet those goals, you state them in the proposal. If those goals are ambitious, you would state that the goals are to cut the time to input patient information and to increase the accuracy of the reports.
- Approach. In this section, give a broad description of what you are going to do and then reinforce that the approach will be successful, by offering success stories if possible or explaining your company’s expertise.
- Action Plan. List specific actions you will take for the client. The action plan is often an attachment of the list of the action items is too long.
- Deliverable. Costs For client proposals, list what the client is expected to pay. For joint cooperation or partnership proposal, list who will pay what portion of the costs.
- Conclusion. In this section, focus on explaining the cost-benefit ratio of the proposal, basically stating that the client or partner receives benefits that more than justify the cost.
|
|
Last Updated ( Friday, 29 February 2008 )
|
Business Proposals
