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A project proposal is an initial document used to define an internet or external project being executed by your business. The proposal includes sections like the title, start and end dates, objectives and goals, requirements, and a description of the proposed solution. The project proposal functions as the working document between your business and your customer, partner, or investor before a potential initiation of the project. Thus, the project proposal is used to define the objectives and requirements of a project for an external party. For the internal party, it is a method to analyze the feasibility and profitability of the project.

The main objective of a project proposal is to get the customer or partner to buy into your product or service. Thus, project proposals are a great way to secure funding from investors, win new customers, or even convince stakeholders to allocate resources to your project. Writing a successful project proposal requires being on the same page with customers, partners, or investors, and wearing their shoes for a moment. You need to think for a moment like them and figure out exactly what they want to achieve with the project.

It’s at the stage of writing a project proposal that you begin to focus on the results critical for your client. It explains why successful businesses get into so much detail with their project proposals because a project proposal outlines your value proposition. When writing a project proposal, you will benefit from having the following elements in it:

1. Central Problem: What is the core problem that your project team aims to solve?
2. Project Resources: What are the resources that will be made available?
3. Project Timeline: What is the suggested project timeline to solve the central problem?
4. Project Budget: What is the cost to execute the project effectively?
5. Key Project Deliverables: What is the scope of the project? How will the success of the project be measured?

At the same time, experience shows that you’ll have very little time to craft a project proposal. To push the envelope and stay proactive in these circumstances, a project and resource management software could be a huge time-saver. Firstly, by just looking at the resource schedule, you could identify who is available at the needed timeframe. Secondly, you could predict the delivery date. For example, Forecast’s Auto Schedule would fast-track your quoting process, building a timeline for you in seconds.

A challenge that often comes up when writing project proposals in large companies are misalignment between teams. When your account executives sell a project and you’re a bit late to the party, it’s somewhat difficult to line up the price with the expectations. That is why businesses turn to one best practice when writing project proposals, which is they set a project baseline to ensure that everyone stays on the same page during the course of the project. Also, remember that your clients demand your full attention, so your tool stack shouldn’t take all your attention. Taking too much time to write a project proposal can make clients backpedal. On that note, mind that a project proposal is not a novel about the strengths of your business. So, there is no space for fluff.