Executive Summary – The single, most fundamental, thing to remember
Should you be in any respect enthusiastic about executive summary writing, you’ve probably already read several articles, webpages – even books – about writing the right business proposal executive summary. Most of them offer a wealth of well-intended suggestions about all the stuff you need to include. They supply a helpful list of the very best 100 critical items you should cover, then tell you to be concise. However, most guides to writing an executive summary skip this one fundamental point:
The job of the executive summary is to sell, not to describe.
Let’s think a little about who uses an Executive Summary, and why. Then it becomes self evident why they have to sell:
- The main Customer (Normally a project or programme manager). Typically, they’ll read the executive summary first, ahead of the remainder of the documentation (barring the document that contains the price – should they be allowed to see that). This satisfies their need to understand your offer quickly.
- The Customer’s proposal assessment team. Assessors often make use of an executive summary to orientate themselves together with your other proposal documents. It could be confusing – especially on larger proposals – to delve right into the detail of an proposal. An executive summary allows these to understand what the overall picture is and the way the element these are assessing suits.
- Senior managers as well as other stakeholders inside the customer community not involved in the actual business proposal assessment. Most organisations offer an hierarchical chain of management who must sanction or endorse the best decision of who to award binding agreement to. They also need to understand greater picture – particularly what your solution gives address their hot buttons.
- The person or those people who are writing the business case – or case for investment for your offering. Business cases, by nature, do not have to describe the detailed offering because they are primarily concerned with financial aspects. But business cases must summarise the chosen offer and describe how it meets their primary needs; a well constructed executive summary which has been properly considered will be able to drop right in to their business case unchanged (There’s a challenge for you!).
- Finally, the executive summary is ideal material to brief people who you deploy to promote, position and influence on behalf of your proposal efforts. Capturing the win themes and customer benefits in a succinct way ensures those people who are influencing on your behalf possess the right message to feed through to those whose opinion you wish to influence.
Begin to think of the executive summary in respect of selling how your offering benefits the client and it will dramatically change the methods that you adopt to structure an executive summary.
The executive summary really does have to sell and not describe.
Are you fed up with losing your proposals? Do you need to write proposals for your company? Have you received a request for proposal and want to know what to do next? Do you want to write good unsolicited proposals?
Find out how you can learn exactly what is involved in proposal writing, including what to put in the proposal and how to structure it by going to our website to learn more about how to write a business proposal at www.learnhowtowriteabusinessproposal.com.
Also, read more thought stimulating posts about executive summary writing here.
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