Persuasive Business Proposals, 3rd Edition

17 Gathering and Tailoring Reusable Content

SOMETIMES WE HAVE TO DEPEND ON OTHER PEOple and it’s frustrating. As proposal writers, for example, we often have to turn to subject matter experts or salespeople for the content we need. As sales professionals, we often need colleagues in marketing or the proposal operation to find specific content that we can use in making our case to a prospect.

The first problem with this situation is that people often don’t write very well. If you are asking them to create something from scratch, what you get may not be usable. A subject matter expert may answer a technical question in an RFP with a torrent of Geek. When subject matter experts write, they often don’t have much sense of how to communicate to non-experts. ...