I once sat in agony as I read through a pile of project proposals. I was looking for my competition because I wanted the project that bad. I was willing to look for the one or two people I was going to have to beat to get it. When I found them, I was going to write my proposal so that it out-shined the others in all ways.
The humor of it all is that those proposals I was reading through didn’t reflect on me at all. They reflected on the other people who were trying to get my project. I should have been grateful that they were awful. But, I was still in agony because of what I was reading.
These are no lie, no punches pulled examples of the proposals I fished through:
“lets talk in detail.company profile attached.”
No, I’m not kidding. This proposal took all of five seconds to write…errors included. The first letter isn’t capitalized. A space doesn’t exist between the first and second sentence. And that just gets me started.
This project was for a bid of about two thousand to three thousand dollars for a month worth of work. If it were a five dollar job, I could understand. But even then, if you want the job put your back into it.
Doing a project proposal is about providing a potential client with enough information to make a decision about you. If I can’t get more than two sentences out of you in your proposal and then they have errors in them on top of it all, you’ve made your statement loud and clear. I don’t want you to do my work.
Another example:
“i can do it plz check ur pmb You can expect professional work from me”
One of my other blog posts actually addresses the issue found here. In addition to the issues raised in the previous example, this proposal confuses formal from informal online dialog. A chat room or a friendly instant message can have “i,” “plz,” and “ur” in it. That’s not a problem because your audience expects you to get with the program, use slang and save yourself time.
But, a potential client doesn’t want to see that you get confused between informal and formal communication. Using informal expressions in your project proposal makes the statement that such errors will also be found in the document they want you to write.
So, how do you put together a professional proposal? Well, let’s go ahead and take a look at that in my next post. We’ll start by showing you why it’s important to write professional proposals.