A business proposal is an important document for a company at any stage. From small to big corporates, a lot of them rely on such proposals to gain greater benefits and investors. However, not many people have time to read through thousands of words and pages.
That’s when summarizing enters the fray and helps convey the same idea briefly. The idea is to introduce the reader to the plan by briefly describing it. So, how do you write such a summary? Let’s dive in and find out.
What is A Business Proposal?
A business proposal is a document that outlines the specifics of a business deal. It typically includes information about the product or service, pricing, and customer benefits. A business proposal can be used to persuade customers to buy your product or service.
It’s also used to make sure that you are not underselling yourself. It also helps in negotiating with your client for better pricing and terms. The common aspects of a business proposal include discussions such as:
- Discussing your company model
- Analyzing your expertise and skills
- Deliberating the benefits and features of a commodity or service
- Analyzing the plan and implementation, you have in mind
- Summarizing the benefit to both parties, which is usually business and the investor
In other words, it’s a company profile that some businesses or entrepreneurs write to sell their idea to people with money (investors). The central idea of this proposal is to help the reader understand the key benefits that entail within investing in the proposal.
Therefore, a business proposal’s final or concluding stages almost always talk about the profit to both parties. Hence why, it’s a requirement to write summaries for such products. Not only because it helps the reader understand and intrigue about the entire plan but also to make it shorter.
Top 10 Tips To Summarize A Business Proposal
A business proposal can average from 10-50 pages. If you calculate it, that’s around 3000-words at least. And, as mentioned before, not a lot of business people or investors have the time to sit down and read business proposals that long.
So, how do you tackle this challenge? By shortening it into a summary of the whole thing. The idea is to coerce them into reading the whole thing by providing a solid glimpse of your plan. So, here are 10 tips and ideas you should tend to when summarizing a business proposal:
1. Be Concise & Accurate
Accuracy and conciseness are two of the things you should aim for from the get-go. If an idea is descriptive, how can you describe it briefly without losing all the key details?
The concept should remain intact, but you can use phrases like “we describe this in detail in the actual proposal.” This will lure your reader into reading the entire proposal once they’re done reading the summary.
2. Make It Readable
Business proposals are technical and use a lot of corporate words and lingo. However, that’s not something you need to tend to in your summary.
The idea of a summary is to make things easier to understand and provide a readable peek into the original content. Therefore, focus on writing a readable summary with easier words.
3. Explain Things In Layman’s Terms
As mentioned before, a summary is supposed to be simple as technicalities are usually in the main content. That’s why you should leave the details for your business proposal.
In your summary, you should try to explain everything in Layman’s terms. Try to use simple lingo and write using uncomplicated words.
4. Provide An Overview
A summary tends to only serve what the reader should expect. Take a movie trailer for an example, it might contain a few key scenes to lure the audience, but it’ll only provide a synopsis for the film.
The basic model of a summary is no different. The ida is to compress thousands of words into a couple of hundreds by leaving out the details but emphasizing the benefits, i.e., how much investors would earn from this proposal i.e., how much investors would earn from this proposal. Here is an investor agreement template that can be used to facilitate progress.
5. Press On Key Points
Bullet points are a major pillar of any content summary. These bullet points allow the reader to grasp what they will be reading about in the main content.
Therefore, they know exactly what to expect when they start reading the proposal. So, this approach will make them eager to learn more about the ideas in detail.
6. Focus On Delivery
Business proposals used to be formal, and they didn’t appreciate any sort of casual tone. However, times have changed, and a conversational tone is the best way to go.
While your business proposal itself can be a little formal, your summary doesn’t have to be. So, try to deliver fluently instead of focusing on being business-friendly.
7. Follow An Orderly Approach
Treat your summary like you would write an outline. It would tell the reader what’s in the intro, the body, and the conclusion. Therefore, an orderly approach is going to be very handy.
8. Focus On Keywords
If you’ve used any keywords for your business proposal, then the summary needs to emphasize that. For example, if an academic expert wrote an article about scholarships, the keywords would be related to scholarships. So, focus on your keywords.
9. Use A Summarizer To Make It Shorter
A summarizing tool would make your life easier by doing 80% of the job for you. You can always tweak the content later, but this is how it would work:
In the upper-right corner, you can pick how long or short you wish for your summary to be. If you pick 50%, then 3000-words would be around 1500-words or less. So, it’s suggested that you pick the shortest option possible.
As seen here, this 500-word content is now less than 100 words. But, if we switch over to bullets, we’ll find even better options:
In a business sense, this would be much more suitable, as it’ll analyze each point of your proposal.
10. Paraphrase Difficult Elements
Once you’re done, you can always try to simplify by manually rewriting or paraphrasing. This will allow your reader to skip past technicalities and read through the summary.
Conclusion
These are the ten best tips today to help you write an outstanding business proposal summary. The idea is to keep the information intact, but turn it brief and concise. Therefore, follow these ten tips and write the best summary you can.
