Why sellers should develop unsolicited proposals
In the business world, business proposals are essential because they are used by sellers to provide specific product information and prices to prospective buyers (Guffey and Loewy 12). A business proposal is a key step in a lengthy process that results in sales of products of a firm (Freed, Romano, and Freed 15). A seller may use unsolicited proposals to create awareness of its products in buyers who could purchase its products.
In fact, it is a business document that could be used to show how an organization scans business environments to identify business needs. For example, a firm could analyze the processes in a learning institution and understand that they are slow because of the limited use of management information systems. Thus, it could write an unsolicited business proposal to the management of the institution requesting it to purchase a management information system that could offer certain advantages to the management.
Main components of unsolicited proposals
Business entities focus on providing excellent products to their customers so that they could have exemplary financial results. Therefore, it could be important for sellers to ensure that they develop unsolicited proposals that contain five important components.
First, an unsolicited proposal should demonstrate that a firm understands a client’s needs. This component is important because products from a seller should be geared toward meeting customer needs. Clients should be able to identify new and essential reasons why the issue addressed by a proposal should be tackled by a particular product or service. Thus, developers of unsolicited proposals should spend a considerable amount of time addressing this component (Freed et al. 45).
Second, unsolicited business proposals should show that a seller has solved similar problems encountered by other firms in the past by offering its products or services. This is particularly important because firms always want to deal with business organizations that are characterized by evidence-based performances. Thus, business proposals should not be sensational and should be honest (Freed et al. 47).
Third, unsolicited proposals should not focus too much on describing a seller. In fact, a proposal should say what customers say about a seller. For example, it could say, “our customers describe us as reliable and punctual.” Prospective buyers could give such statements much weight because they are regarded as third party references (Freed et al. 49).
Fourth, an unsolicited proposal should correlate a seller’s pricing with the value that a buyer could get from a certain product or service. Thus, this component should convince a prospective buyer that the proposed product or service could solve its problem and help it to improve performance. For example, a firm could be incurring a loss of about $500,000 annually due to the inefficiency of production processes. Thus, a proposed solution should help the firm to avoid making a loss and start making profits (Freed et al. 56).
Fifth, it is important for unsolicited proposals to have clear text that reflects the following information (Bovée, Thill and BarbSchatzman 46; Flowerdew 110; Hamper, Robert and Baugh 34):
- Reference numbers.
- Name and type of organization.
- Information about workers to be contacted for negotiation.
- The date of submission.
- A short title.
- A brief abstract that should act as an executive summary of a proposal.
- Price of a product or service.
Works Cited
Bovée, Courtland L., John V. Thill, and Barbara E. Schatzman. Business communication today. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Print.
Flowerdew, Lynne. “Devising and implementing a business proposal module: Constraints and compromises.” English for Specific Purposes 29.2 (2010): 108- 120. Print.
Freed, Richard C., Joseph D. Romano, and Shervin Freed. Writing winning business proposals. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Print.
Guffey, Mary Ellen, and Dana Loewy. Business communication: Process and product. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2010. Print.
Hamper, Robert J., and L. Sue Baugh. Handbook for writing proposals. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY: 2011. Print