The Essential Sales Proposal Checklist

Working on a sales proposal? Here's a quick way to assess whether you've got a chance of actually winning the business, based upon a conversation I had a couple of years ago with sales proposal guru Tom Sant.

Examine the current draft of your sales proposal carefully. Then answer the following questions as honestly as you can:

• Does the customer know who we are?
• Is the customer expecting us to bid on this?
• Does the executive summary address customer needs?
• Is the executive summary one page or less?
  
• Have we replaced all the jargon that's meaningful only to us?
• Are we sure that another vendor doesn't have the inside track?
• Does the proposal follow the customer's specified format and outline?
• Have we removed all the meaningless marketing fluff (e.g. "state-of-the-art")?
  
• Has someone edited out other customer names from boilerplate material?
  
• Is the writing clear and forceful rather than flat and technical?
  
• Has the proposal been edited so that it contains no glaring grammatical errors?
  
• Can the proposal convince the customer that we can actually deliver?
• Does the proposal define how we'll measure customer satisfaction?
• Is the proposal being submitted on time and to the right people?

Have I missed anything?

UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF THE SALES PROPOSAL CHECKLIST.