Getting Your Written Business Proposal Ready for Primetime

There’s a challenging set of circumstances that startups face when preparing their business proposal pitches.

They’re targeting a wide range of audiences to convey their value proposition, but the bottom line really focuses on potential investors, lawyers, and later on, industry analysts and financial analysts. These are all print-heavy audiences.

Startups have an enticing aura about them — energy, young founders, digital savviness, hard work and intense energy. The passion is there. The focus is there. Oral presentations are ideal for conveying the essence of the startup.

But what do you do when there is the inevitable need to create a written document to submit to investors, legal teams, future CXO employees, award review panels, and grants? How do you bridge that gap from passion to print persuasion?

Words matter. Sentence clarity matters. If you rely on your close circle of friends, relatives, or local marketing gurus, you enter an echo chamber. An outside perspective is key — but why?

Neutral, objective review is your best friend at this stage. You don’t want yes men and women — you want the kindly but determined, experienced perspective that tells it like it is.

Even though much of the world relies on visual presentation, the written proposal is the best method to pin down all the various, scattered thoughts that comprise your startup, and it’s the way to convince the key influencers who absorb information best when it is in print. You want that written trail to document the logical, successive thought process behind your startup, to demonstrate that you have anticipated and assessed the landscape, and to measure progress against initiatives.

Surveys tell us that a substantial portion of your potential audience trusts written documents above other forms of communication. Shortchanging this part of your startup process will come back to bite you in the proverbial butt.

Words are the power you can use to convince and persuade. “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.” [Author Joseph Conrad]