Bid executive summaries - or executive propositions?

Sometimes it helps to think about what things are called. If you are going to win or lose a contract purely on price, then you could argue that the executive summaries at the beginning of your bid don’t matter. But if you know that winning depends upon your ability to articulate a proposition more powerfully and competitively than the rest of the pack, then executive summaries can make a direct impact on the bottom line of your business. If that’s the case, it might be better to call them something else.

The term ‘Executive Summary’ is an odd phrase to use in most bid responses. Yes, they’re aimed at executives (and often just one or two decision makers at that); but only occasionally should they be regarded as ‘summaries’.

This is the case for all of the executive summaries that we write on behalf of clients because, for these very large bids, the decision makers won’t be reading the hundreds of pages of detail contained in the rest of the submission. What they’ll want to know – and they’ll want to know this very rapidly by the way – is why your organisation should win. What makes you stand apart from the crowd?

A better term: ‘Executive Proposition’

So, although ‘Executive Summary’ is usually the right term to use when writing reports, we find it helpful to recognise that these sections of a bid can be more accurately called ‘Executive Propositions’.

The Executive Proposition does far more than merely summarise the contents of your bid; it distills and articulates your competitive message. If you succeed in communicating this to the handful of decision makers who will be reading your executive proposition then – all things being equal – you should be confident that you will win the work. (The phrase ‘all things being equal’ in this case implies that your price is right and that you can, indeed, deliver on what you promise.)

Moreover, in a large bid, it is quite possible that this is the only section of the bid that the decision makers who will be awarding the contract will read and so it needs to be editorially self-contained.

Understanding that these are the objectives of this part of the bid is critical because of the clear implications for the content, structure and messaging of the summary. But this understanding also has an impact on timings. Another problem with using the word ‘summary’, after all, is that it tends to imply something that is written right at the end of a writing process. But in many cases we would argue that the first draft of the Executive Summary should be written before anything else.

After all, if you can’t articulate your proposition at the start of the writing process, you’ve got to question whether it’s worth competing at all.

Writing Machine’s unique Writing for Bids enables individuals and teams to write clearer, more compelling, professional, and far more competitive bid and pitch documents. Find out more here.

Paul Ayling is the founder and CEO of Writing Machine.

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