A solution to writing winning sales proposals and other sales documents (Part 1)

By Ellis Pratt and Carol Johnston. 11 December 2003

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Introduction

Have you ever given a prospective customer sales literature that contained avoidable errors, or felt uncomfortable about the quality of the sales proposals you've sent out? This article explains how we built a solution to producing sales proposals and other sales literature for our own company using an affordable content management solution, one that costs from $400 to buy.

When we started our company, Cherryleaf Ltd, we wanted to have from the start a system that would ensure we'd be consistent across all our sales and marketing media. For us, that meant a Web site, sales proposals, training course outlines, datasheets and simple marketing brochures. We also wanted to be able to amend content quickly and reduce the amount of manpower needed to produce it. As we claim to be documentation specialists, we needed to take some of our own medicine.

Problems we wanted to solve

There were a number of problems that we'd experienced at our previous employer that we were determined to avoid or solve:

1. We'd found it difficult at our previous employer to be consistent across different documents and different media. For example, the training course outlines, which included our booking terms and conditions, differed between the versions on the Web site and the ones emailed out.
2. When the sales proposals were proofread and checked, we'd find we were often changing the same sections each time. The same errors kept re-appearing, particularly with staff biographies. This was because we didn't have a definitive, correct source to base each new proposal on.
3. We'd waste time trying to find information for tenders, such as the insurance cover, that already existed in previous proposals. Again, this was because we didn't have a definitive, correct source.
4. Updating the Web site had been a lengthy process that involved lots of people within the company. The biggest problems arose because the Web site was set up in a way that meant that only the technical staff had the skills to create new Web pages.
5. Writing sales proposals also seemed to take a lot longer than we felt it should. Different versions of a proposal would be emailed back and forth between the bid team as more complex bids developed.

What we developed

We built our solution around a low cost single source content management system called AuthorIT. AuthorIT enables you to "single-source" your documentation - you produce your document in many different output media, but only store and work with it in one place.

Re-using information across documents and proposals

Creating a document in AuthorIT is like making something out of a set of child's building bricks - you construct your document from many smaller pieces called "objects". AuthorIT stores the components that make up your document in a single database, so you can re-use chunks of information across documents.

You can re-use each object as many times as you like - in the same document or in many documents. When you make a change to the object, your changes happen instantly in all the places where that object is used. This capability has saved us a lot of time and has given us the consistency we want.

We embed topics within other topics, which makes it is possible for us to write core pieces of content once. By putting all the chunks of information into the system, we created a library of supporting materials that writers could choose to include in their proposals.

In some instances we want to include or exclude entire topics, depending on the output, and the solution enables us to do this very easily.

Creating different documents

We combine the chunks of information, or topics, in different ways. For example:

• We use the training course outlines on our Web site and on A4 printed sheets
• We use our "brand positioning" statement in nearly all our sales and marketing literature.

You generate documents in Author IT using "Books". We can arrange the same topics into a different order within each Book, which means we can re-arrange the content in each sales proposal to suit each situation. We've created a series of Word and HTML templates for the different types of output we need, and AuthorIT uses the relevant template when each document is generated.

The illustrations below show how a topic from the library is used in different documents.

Example 1: The topic "About Cherryleaf" is used in a sales proposal put together for ABC Corp, with the proposal generated as a Word document.

Example 2: The topic "About Cherryleaf" is used as part of a page on our Web site, and generated automatically within the HTML code of the page

Next - Part 2

• Part 2 of this article covers the benefits and drawbacks of the solution.