A solution to writing winning sales proposals and other sales documents (Part 2)
By Ellis Pratt and Carol Johnston. 11 December 2003
Part One of this article explains how we built a solution that produces sales proposals and other sales literature for our own company using an affordable content management solution (one that costs from $400 to buy). This part covers the benefits and drawbacks of the solution.
See also: Writing Sales Proposals: e-learning training course on writing sales proposals
Benefits of the solution
We believe our solution gives us the means by which we are able to:
- Structure proposals into consistent, logical "chunks" that make them easy to understand
- Be consistent across all our sales literature
- Write definitive, correct chunks of information that we can reuse in new proposals
- Reduce the number of errors that occur in documents
- Enable non-technical staff to produce our Web site
- Reduce the time needed to produce our Web site, sales proposals and sales literature
Points to consider
Writing style
A single sourcing solution requires a different approach to the traditional, linear, way of writing. Instead, we need to write in a way that is very similar to writing an online document. To maximize flexibility, sometimes we need to identify very small units of information. Anything we need to reformat, re-purpose or exclude becomes its own "grain of information".
Team-based authoring
We are lucky in that we don't need to delegate responsibilities to staff that don't understand the system we have developed or the software we use. Everyone who contributes has a good understanding of the system and the software.
Also, we don't need to guide our writers through the development process by pre-structuring the document i.e. providing cues and tips, so this capability isn't in our solution.
It's not based on Microsoft Word
Our solution is not based on Microsoft Word, and AuthorIT can seem daunting to use at first. If Word is a requirement for you, then there are two approaches available:
- Write some of the content in Word and then import it into AuthorIT
- Use software that uses Word as its authoring environment. There are a number available, but they will cost more.
Other outputs
Since we wrote this article we have made some further developments to the solution:
- We produce a monthly HTML-based email newsletter on technical writing and document development issues
- We use it create slide presentations, either in PowerPoint or HTML format (Opera and Internet Explorer browsers can display HTML pages as if they were slides). It's fantastic having a database of slides to draw upon for presentations. We also save a lot of time by only needing to edit the single definitive source, and by being able to have a team-based approach to creating slide presentations.
- We use it to produce press releases.
It's now available to others
We have modified our solution so that it is now available to others. We will provide you will a base system and customise it to your particular requirements. It includes information imported from your sales proposals that builds into a database of best practice content that can be re-used by your sales force when they need to write proposals or presentations.
Contact us for more information.
Conclusion
Because every proposal that an organization sends out reduces all its sales planning, relationship building, calls and presentations down to a set of A4 pages, we wanted to develop a solution that would help us get ours right. For a very small outlay, we have developed a solution to our sales documentation needs that means we will save time in the long term and ensure we send out a consistent message across all our sales literature.
Let us know what you think
We welcome your comments and thoughts on this article.