Why You Should Write the Executive Summary First

The purpose of a proposal is to persuade the reader to follow your recommendations. Proposals must articulate a clear and compelling message that will persuade the reader to take action. A successful proposal is built completely around your rationale. You must carefully define and be able to articulate this rationale before you even start to write the proposal. If you develop your rationale while you write, your proposal may lose some of its overall persuasiveness, and the reasons why the reader should follow your recommendations may ultimately never be fully integrated.

Writing the Executive Summary first will force you to articulate your rationale and to develop the basic elements of persuasion. It also provides you with a foundation to build that rationale into the rest of the proposal, and enables you to achieve a fully integrated presentation.

Why You Should Write the Executive Summary Last

As you develop your proposal you begin to really learn what is truly important. On the last day of production, you know far more about what is required to win than you did on the first day, and it is challenging to gain this critical insight before it is too late. The Executive Summary that you may develop on the last day will always be different from the Executive Summary you would write on day one. If you build your proposal around what you know on the first day, you will be building your proposal around incomplete knowledge.

While you could argue that starting early and doing your intelligence gathering homework is the best way to respond, you will never have full knowledge at the beginning. This is true, only because of the RFP.

Going through the RFP, item by item, and developing your solution and your response teaches you various things. The strategies that were developed before the RFP was released often need to be changed or even dropped based on what is in the final RFP. And even if you are really diligent about reading the full RFP as soon as it comes out, you won’t have a full understanding of all the implications until you’ve fully developed your solution, written the response, and examined and evaluated all of the related pricing trade-offs.

When you write the Executive Summary last, it will reflect a better understanding of the customer, the solution, and the competitive environment. Your result is a proposal that is far more persuasive.

How Do You Decide?

Like many things in life, the best approach for you will depend on your circumstances. If you are having trouble articulating why the customer should follow your recommendations, then doing the Executive Summary first may be an excellent way to start. You can always go back to it later and make changes. If, however, your rationale depends on what your recommendations are, and you won’t know until they are developed and priced, you may wish to hold off until later. However, don’t hold off too long or you will run out of time.

A hybrid approach is to create a draft Executive Summary, with an expectation that it will get thrown out or completely revised as you go through the process and learn more about what is important. What I like about this approach of revising as you go along is that you will have a baseline understanding of your rationale that you can share with other people throughout the process, which will help to foster a shared-understanding and illuminate any discrepancies. If you end up revising the Executive Summary on a daily basis, the effort is not wasted.

Confirmation, validation, and revision of the reasons why your customer should follow your recommendations can only help you achieve a successful proposal.