High Quality Project Proposals – Your Key to Winning Project Deals

Companies looking to buy complex IT services face much higher and more asymmetric risks than your organization, as a vendor, faces. Your risks are lower profits or loss, the need for more resources ( triggering delays in other projects), delayed cash flows, etc. On the other hand, your prospective faces risks such as cost and time overruns, needing more critical human resources, needing more management attention, opportunity costs associated with all the above, etc. Please read our recent blog to understand how buyers’ risks are stalling your prospects.

Submitting a high-quality project proposal matching the RFP is the single most important thing that you can do to make your prospective customer believe that your organization understands its needs and has a plan to meet them.

A quality project proposal is like having your ace salesperson with your customers 24 x 7. 

High quality project proposal

What should a quality project proposal contain? 

1. A quality project proposal should explicitly address all explicit customer requirements.
2. It should suggest and address implicit customer requirements.
3. It should provide a report on the technical feasibility of the proposed solution supported by your experience of execution.
4. It should provide a realistic project plan backed by a work breakdown structure (WBS) and the availability of key resources.
5. It should define the roles of the project team members.
6. It should explicitly mention risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID) and describe how these will be mitigated.

Building a great project proposal

How should you build a great project proposal?

1. You need a collection of templates of project proposals for different sizes and types of projects. Using templates will ensure that you use your experience and avoid making big and small mistakes.
2. Your salespeople, development or project teams, resource management or HR group, and finance need to collaborate to build a great proposal.
3. You should have a margin calculator based on realistic and current costs of resources. This should be approved by your finance department. 
4. Your proposal should be vetted for technical and financial correctness.
5. You should have a well-defined workflow for building proposals. The workflow should include authorization including that for exceptions.

Building project proposals is a complex and iterative process. If you rely on spreadsheets and emails, the process will be prone to errors and delays.  You need an opportunity management and proposal-building system that is connected to your CRM, HR, and finance systems.

Kytes PSA’s Opportunity and Proposal Management module

Kytes PSA’s opportunity and proposal management module provides you with a proposal index, templates to choose from, section-wise work assignments, and proposal document building. Since it is a part of a full-fledged professional services automation software it avoids errors and delays involved in multiple versions of data.

Build great project proposals and inspire confidence in your ability to deliver.

Contact us at [email protected] for more information and a demo.

Hemant Karandikar

Hemant Karandikar, a Product Marketing Strategist and an IIT Bombay graduate in Electrical Engineering, weaves decades of experience in R&D, engineering, and management. He initiated a successful industrial electronics startup and subsequently built a thriving consulting practice. As an author of management books, Hemant propels leadership, innovation, and content creation. He collaborates with Design Directions Pvt. Ltd. to shape UI/UX design. A fervent runner, he coaches individuals towards a healthier lifestyle through running