Powerful Proposals: How to Give Your Business the Winning Edge

by Terry R. Bacon, David G. Pugh

How does a company constantly win more business than its rivals? A key factor is the ability to create proposals that outshine those from even the strongest competitors. Powerful Proposals helps businesses maximize the selling power of their proposals, with proven strategies for going beyond "this is what we do" documents in favor of customer-centered offers that highlight the tangible benefits your company offers. This powerful process offers tools and techniques that will let any firm: * assess their "winner or loser" proposal status and take proactive steps to become a winner * address the ""Big Four"" questions that a proposal must answer to be successful * create "A+" proposals in less time with less wasted effort via a simple, repeatable process * neutralize the issue of price when the firm is not the low-price provider Powerful Proposals takes readers step by step through designing executive summaries, writing themes, and generating the text. There is also valuable information on strategy, graphics, callouts, and other visual elements.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 3, 2005

About the author

Terry R. Bacon is a poet, playwright, and award-winning author of more than a dozen books, including The Elements of Power, Elements of Influence, What People Want, Selling to Major Accounts, and Effective People Skills. He is the co-author of The Shipley Associates Style Guide, Winning Behavior, The Behavioral Advantage, Writing Winning Proposals, and Adaptive Coaching. He wrote most of these books for Lore International Institute, an executive-development consultancy he co-founded and led as President and CEO. He later sold that firm to Korn/Ferry International and has since retired. Executive Excellence magazine named him one of the Top 100 Thinkers on Leadership in the World.

He has a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the American University and a B.S. in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point (Go Army!) and has studied leadership and management at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. In his working life, he developed dozens of educational programs, software, assessment tools, and simulations. He delivered educational programs to thousands of professionals and executives worldwide. Since retiring, he created a widely used website on power and influence (www.powerandinfluence.online), through which he offers online assessments of individuals’ sources of power (Power Sources Self-Assessment) and their effective use of common influence techniques (Influence Effectiveness Self-Assessment).

He has served on the boards of a number of non-profits in his hometown, including the Women’s Resource Center, Durango Steam Park, Music in the Mountains (chairman for two years), and Friends of the Fort Lewis College Theatre. He is past chair of the Fort Lewis College Foundation and currently serves on its governance and investment committees. He is also a co-founder of Durango PlayFest (a playwriting festival focused on new plays) and is currently chair of its program committee, which selects the plays to be presented each summer. The Leadership Center at Fort Lewis College is named in his honor.

A world traveler, he resides in the mountains of Colorado. He studies history and cosmology when he is not working on another writing project. Storm Warning in his first novel and the first in a series of Sonny Marshall thrillers. He has completed another novel, The Cerulean Ark, which will be published in the winter of 2023/2024.

He is married to Debra Parmenter. Together, they have three children and eleven grandchildren. He remembers everyone’s birthday but struggles to recall just how old they are.

Reviews

[Scott Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good intro to proposal techniques.

[Ted Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a useful book though I found it quite dense. It's too bad because there is a lot very good information here that was just really hard to extract. This is the kind of subject that would be much better communicated had it been interspersed with stories of real life situations, stories or some other way of breaking up the density. I'll put a lot of this information to immediate use however and I'm glad I read it.

[Curtismchale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book about the RFP process. Like a e said before if you're responding to RFP's then you already failed.

You need to do better marketing so that you're the preferred expert or be the sole source of the intellectual property.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slick book. That's my review. Start here if you want to get your hands around proposals processes in a complex B2B environment.