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Welcome to another episode of the podcast “Write Winning Proposals”. In this podcast, I’m revisiting the idea of asking yourself questions to prepare for writing your proposal response.

In episode #5, I also talked about asking questions, but the focus was on a series of probing questions specific to the questions they expect you to respond to and using a drill-down technique to ask questions about each subsequent answer.

There are, however, a few other questions you should also ask yourself about the client and the proposal as part of your strategy process before you start writing. Read the rest of this entry »

While working on my upcoming book recently, I realized that the process of writing a proposal is exactly the same as baking a cake. Unfortunately, however, cake is a lot tastier than your RFP response.

In any case, for a successful proposal, here is the Recipe:

• You are asked to bake a cake
• Find a recipe
• Modify the recipe to suite their tastes
• Grease the Pan and heat up the oven
• Review the ingredients, put them in order
• Add the ingredients for the cake into the bowl
• Beat it until smooth. Test and repeat
• Pour it in the pan and level it out.
• Put the cake in the oven until done
• Test for doneness
• Put it back and cook some more if necessary.
• Let it cool and add some frosting.
• Serve it up
• Hope for positive reviews

If you have your own analogy or anecdote, feel free to leave a comment.