Chapter 16

Ten Templates for Building Your Proposal

IN THIS CHAPTER

Complying with customer requirements and proving your abilities

Budgeting for the cost of the proposal process

Ensuring your proposal’s quality

The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) provides the collected best practices of the world’s leading professionals in proposal, bid, and opportunity management, and business development, in its Body of Knowledge (BoK). This book is an outgrowth of the APMP BoK, and we provide a collection of references and tools online that contain a portion of the BoK’s contents.

The web page that we provide includes downloadable templates for you to use and adapt that we know will streamline your proposal writing efforts. (You can find out more about the templates we provide, plus the URL, in the appendix.) We know how busy you are as a proposal writer, and these templates will take a load off your plate and your mind. They cover everything from proposal process management tools to content models. This chapter summarizes the purpose and value of ten of them.

Creating a Compliance Matrix

A compliance matrix is a simple, effective tool that helps you in two ways:

  • It summarizes and shows your level of compliance to the customer.
  • It keeps track of your team’s approach for responding to the Request for Proposal (RFP).

A compliance matrix is basically a checklist both for you and for evaluators to make sure you comply with all RFP response requirements. The compliance ...

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