Boilerplate is Bad for Business - Templates without the Fluff

It used to be that most business was conducted face to face, or at least over the phone. Odds were that your prospective clients knew who you were, and your competition was from your own neighborhood - you knew who they were, too. In that local environment, it was possible to distinguish yourself from the competition by your personality alone. Others in your business community knew you by the reputation you had established there.

Now our world is global and we are all connected mostly by impersonal means via email and the internet. Whether you are vying for a job, trying to secure a loan or a business contract, looking for new clients or introducing your products to new customers, odds are that now your competitors will number in the hundreds - if not thousands - and they can come from anywhere around the world.

On the face of things, it seems easy to just find a “template” you can just put your name on, but unfortunately following that strategy results in proposals that contain a lot of fluff and wordage but deliver little in the way of useful data. Plus it won’t be in a writing style that matches the rest of your material such as your web site, brochures or other collateral.

And worst of all, when you use boilerplate forms, your proposal ends up looking and reading like hundreds - if not thousands - of others.

Imagine being the poor proposal reader who sees the exact same words over and over again; your eyes would glaze over in a hurry and all proposals would seem equal. But it's never in your best interest for your proposal to appear equal to everyone else's; you want to land the job or secure that loan. Using the identical form as your competitors greatly increases the odds that your proposal will end up in the slush pile instead of on the decision maker's desk. You need your proposal to stand out, not blend in.

Proposal Kit takes a different approach from this 'fill in the blank' style. Instead of giving you paragraphs of essentially meaningless boilerplate text, each of our templates provides you with instructions, constructive suggestions, and examples of appropriate information to put into each proposal page, as well as giving you a professional format to use to present your ideas. The words on each page come from you, and so does the tone and style of your presentation.

You may be worried that without a lot of boilerplate text, you will feel lost and sit staring at blank pages without a clue about where to start and what to include on each page. Without boilerplate text, will proposal writing be a lot more work? The answer is no. Don't fret! You're not starting from scratch.

Although you will be writing the words and supplying the information the decision makers need, you will never be perplexed about what to add to your proposal when you're using Proposal Kit. We have hundreds of template pages for you to choose from, and hundreds of suggestions on how to connect those pages and elaborate on important topics. No matter what type of business or nonprofit work you're engaged in, odds are that you can find the templates you need here. And it's easy to see how any page can be individualized for your specific requirements.

We understand that it can be difficult for a proposal writer to think of everything, so our templates recommend various items and ideas you might want to include on that page, as well as suggesting ways to structure that information. The suggestions not only include the text elements you might want to include, but suggestions for website URLs, graphs, blueprints, and diagrams, because we know that you want to present your information in the format that is most appropriate for your project and most useful to your readers.

We've designed Proposal Kit to be flexible enough to use for almost any sort of writing, too, so you can use our templates to create not only proposals, but in-house reports, scientific analyses, financial documents, annual reports, feasibility studies - almost any sort of document you might need in business. Even resumes are covered.

If you ever still feel stuck for inspiration, you can always get ideas from our samples. As well as hundreds of templates for proposal pages, Proposal Kit includes over a hundred sample proposals, studies, and reports from a wide variety of organizations for all sorts of situations. International shipping, manufacturing, software networking, child day care, food catering, nonprofit programs to house the homeless, publicity campaigns - almost anything you can name is in there. The list goes on and on.

Even if we don't yet have a sample proposal for the specific type of project you have mind, you'll be able to find one or more samples in the list that are similar enough to get you started on the right track. We've done our best to provide sample proposals that will show our customers - from the individual entrepreneur to the largest corporation - the wide variety of documents they can create with Proposal Kit. By exploring these samples, you'll see how our templates can be easily used and assembled into a unique package, and you'll also get ideas on how to best present your ideas and sell yourself to your readers.

You want your proposal to showcase your ideas and highlight your experience, exhibit your personality, and above all, stand out from the crowd. Those are our goals, too. When you use Proposal Kit, your proposal will be easy to write, the result will be professional, and your presentation style will be your own.

You'll feel like an expert as you put your information on the pages. Your finished product will be well structured, easy to read, and written in your own words. Best of all, it will be a unique proposal that actually represents you. It will be a proposal that the decision maker will remember.