Never start your Executive Summary with:

“We are pleased to submit our proposal for.….”

If we had a dollar for every time our clients commenced with this opening we would be very comfortably well off! It is dull, unimaginative and usually reflects that a poor level of effort has been applied to this key response document.

The Executive Summary is a great opportunity to sell your solution and your business by demonstrating your capability, capacity and competence. By considering your audience, the Executive Summary can be framed to support the client’s strategy and, in the process, gain broad organisational support. On average, Executives spend 10 minutes assessing proposals and the Executive Summary is central to their perception of a supplier’s ability to successfully partner with them in the future.

A powerful approach is to adopt a customer-focused framework where the key indicators of the opportunity are identified. This can be achieved as follows:

  1. Establish the context in the client’s terms by identifying their vision. This may require you to conduct research to further your understanding of their needs but in our experience it is effort well spent. For example, if you are responding to an Aged Care sector tender, the opening of your Executive Summary could include relevant information about the sector’s future growth prospects and how the client’s unique strategy or vision will deliver for the sector.
  2. The next step is to link the client’s vision to your solution. You stand a much greater chance of success by demonstrating an understanding of the clients business, their vision and how you can assist them to achieve it. This may be in the form of a credible linking statement.
  3. Now you have your Executive Summary opening, the next step is to identify the customer’s hot buttons. Hot buttons are the issues that keep the client awake at night and are the reason they are putting work out to tender. They are looking to your solution to solve their problems. Typically there will be 4 to 6 hot buttons that may not be explicitly stated in a request for tender. One way to determine hot buttons is to ask the client’s key stakeholders about their major concerns. Another option is to run an internal workshop that includes staff from key functions such as sales, business development, project management, technical, financial and commercial.
  4. As they represent the consolidated list of issues and motivators driving a purchasing decision, the next step is to prioritise the customer’s hot buttons. To do this, the Executive Summary should identify and outline the benefits of your solution against each hot button in order of importance. It is crucial to note that we are talking about the benefits that will meet a specific hot button, not the features of your solution. This is because features focus on the seller whereas clients purchase the benefits. You should aim to quantify benefits whenever possible. Proof can be in the form of success stories which describe an existing client’s reason for selecting your organisation, the solution delivered and the resulting benefit. Graphics with a caption are an effective way to achieve this evidence based quantification. For example, a strong action caption for a software development company is: “XYZ’s award-winning Agile-Code software reduced staff training time from 10 hours to 5 hours with intuitive graphical use interface tools implemented on 10 Department of Defence projects in the past 3 years.”

By following the above steps whilst adopting a customer-focused approach and using the client’s language you can develop and Executive Summary that establishes a rapport with your client that builds understanding. By reiterating the hot buttons throughout the tender response you will enhance your win prospects. It may seem daunting at first to adopt this framework but, with practice, it will become the centrepiece of your successful response strategy.