DIY Tip #5: Write the Executive Summary First

• Gaurav Rastogi
• 26 Feb. 2018

Recently, I was called in to fix the proposals desk for a large company. The proposals team wrote $24 billion worth of proposals every year, but weren’t winning business. Everyone was concerned why. I asked to see some sample proposals. Now my eyes hurt from all that scrolling.

The average proposal was 150 pages long. Even for small value bids, the proposals were routinely more than forty pages long or more. I ask you-- who reads long-form documents these days? These were franken-docs assembled by committee. No executive should have to read them. Most executives (and I suspect most everybody else) just reads the executive summary. In this company’s case, the executive summaries were five-fifteen pages long. Once again, I ask you, which executive have the time, patience or attention span to consume a fifteen-page “summary”. This proposal engine was badly broken. The company is a long-suffering growth laggard, and it’s because they don’t read their own proposals.

"The Executive Summary is the front desk for your proposal. Make it work for you."

Teams that don’t do well tend to write the executive summary in the end, after the shit-mountain has been assembled. This is a terrible waste of time and resources, because it’s clear that the people working on the proposal didn’t have a clear idea of what the proposal is really about, and just went about answering their specific line item mechanically. There’s no “spirit” in the proposal.

The senior-most sales executive on the pursuit should write, sketch or whiteboard the executive summary first. Clearly articulate why the client needs to do something different, why they should do something now (urgency), and why your company is the best choice for helping them. Write down the specific parts of the problem and the solutions to those problems. Once you have your basic skeletal executive summary, the team can assemble the proposal in line with it. At the end, you can rewrite the summary to fit.

Take all the open pursuits on your table and write out the Executive Summary. Tell us what happens.