A Rhetorical Infrastructure for Selling

You want to make your message unforgettable to your potential clients, and you want to show why you are superior to all competitors. But, how do you make this happen? To have a winning proposal, you must first be able to clearly convey your theme. The proposal theme is the backbone of every proposal. A theme statement is to a proposal what the spinal chord is to your body; everything in the proposal attaches to the theme statement. Hot buttons, emphasis, tone, angle and, yes, selling points revolve around the theme of the proposal.

It's important to make sure that in your proposal planning (see Proposal Planning: What to Do Before Kickoff) you dedicate some time to coming up with a theme statement that is compelling and readily understood and agreed to by all contributors to the proposal. Ideally, the theme is slotted into the proposal plan from the capture plan. In other words, business development has already figured out what the backbone for the proposal should be. The trick here is to capture the emotion behind the purchase as much as explaining the approach and solution. The theme should always contain a benefit statement to start with and the 'how' in the second part of it. At this point, it becomes a matter of word-smithing the theme statement so that it can debut in your proposal right up front, at the top of the executive summary.

Proposal writers worth their salt are able to use the theme statement the same way that orchestra ensemble employs the conductor to guide them through their performance. Writers can look at even deeply technical content and understand how to spin it based on what the theme of the proposal is. If the theme calls for efficiency, a passage about coding will include words such as reuse, modules and best practices. If, instead for the same proposal, the theme revolves around quality, the same text will contain words such as QA and various stages of testing before release.

Your selling becomes that much easier when your theme statement is apparent and is implicitly and explicitly supported throughout your proposal. Ideally, the theme becomes a visceral overtone that infuses all aspects of the proposal so that an evaluator knows in his gut that efficiency is what you plan to deliver.