Proposal Writing – 21st Century Proposal Writing Strategies

Proposal writing strategies that meet 21st century standards depend on one overriding principle.
You must be passionate about creating proposals that sell for you when you are not in front of your clients.
So what does that have to do with 21st-century strategies?
Let me explain by showing how the types of websites you display to the world relate to your proposals.
Websites fall into three categories.
CATALOG WEBSITES
As the name indicates, this type of website literally displays your catalog of products, prices, specifications, special offers, and delivery terms. Visiting office supply sellers such as Staples or Office Depot or computer companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard illustrate this type of website.
These websites offer a multiple of choices for shoppers to choose from. And, they offer potential customers alternatives to brick-and-mortar selling points.
BROCHURE-WARE WEBSITES
Again, as the name implies, what you find at these sites generally reflects product or service information and contact information you could see on the company’s brochures. They focus on aesthetic feel and marketing information.
Their purpose is to influence you to contact them to learn how they can help you. The purpose of these sites is to generate leads.
IMPULSE WEBSITES
These sites are sometimes called “One Pagers.”
These sites have one objective in mind – to influence you to order now. They do not offer multiple products, multiple options, or multiple pricing.
These sites contain benefits, benefits, and more benefits that you realize by buying product before leaving the site.
Besides the benefits, they contain endorsements, letters of recommendation, and glowing statements of results from delighted customers.
And they offer unbelievable incentives. If you buy now, you will receive bonus items, whose dollar value equals two or three times what you actually pay for the product or service you buy.
The purpose of impulse websites is to convince you to buy now .
These sites rely only on the written word to influence you. Yes, some of the sites include video or audio endorsements, but the basic premise remains that the customer is not in front of them and so the website must sell them now.
Now the question becomes – which of these three website strategies most closely aligns to your proposal writing strategies?
If you answered number one or two, you might be wasting a lot of time, money, and effort with your proposal writing efforts.
Your proposal writing should employ impulse websites’ overriding passion for selling when prospective customers must rely on the written word.