How To Write An Out-Of-This-World, Really Excellent Executive Summary

If you struggle to write a crisp and compelling executive summary, I have a formula you can follow. Use it to help you position your value and capabilities as the only choice.

But first, Dear Reader, we need to get a few things out of the way:

I’m going to say that most executive summaries aren’t very good. Partly because they’re written in the 11th hour, partly because people don’t have a formula to write one, but mostly because of these three reasons:

1. You don’t believe it will make an iota of difference to help you win or cause you to lose the pursuit (So why bother?)
2. You believe that decision-makers don’t read executive summaries anymore (Who would bother?)
3. You don’t enjoy the task of writing, especially sweating a high-level narrative that links your offer to the client’s goals or big mission (Such a bother!)

My only question is, “Would you like to position your company in the best light across all your interactions with current and prospective clients?”

Of course, you would.

So, think of your executive summary as the opportunity to double down on why the client should unequivocally choose you over the competition.

With that out of the way, here is an executive summary formula that follows eight distinct steps:

1. Intro: Start with the client
2. Your unique point of view about their situation
3. Summarise the strategic benefits you’ll bring
4. Provide proof
5. Your team: bios and experience
6. High-level solution strategy
7. How will you deliver?
8. Close: Prove your commitment

What’s Different About This Formula?

Capabilities v features: Over the years, there’s been resistance from some to follow this formula because they believe the executive summary should mostly outline the solution. However, C-suite decision-makers are interested in the outcomes your solution can enable and not the nuts and bolts of your product or service.

Have team = commitment: The other area of resistance is inserting specifics about the team that will either implement the solution or support the client ongoing. The main excuse from the vendor is they don’t want to commit their best resources at the Request for Proposal (RFP) stage in case they don’t win. However, it’s a weakness as clients perceive the vendor as not invested in their success. The way to overcome this dilemma is to insert people’s names and role descriptions with a caveat that the names might change, but the quality of the personnel will not. And if you don’t yet have any personnel, at least provide specifics on the types of roles and years of experience these people will have if you were to win this piece of business.

The Eight-Step Executive Summary Formula Explained

(1) Intro: Start With The Client

• The introduction must entirely focus on the client, and you need to make every word count in your opening sentence. For example, “As a payment company leading the charge to transform banking, you could continue on the same path...”
• Other ideas for your opener include asking a provocative question, imagining a bright future for them because of your solution (without mentioning your solution) or opening with a statement relating to their industry.
• And, if you’re still writing the following opener, it’s time to stop: “This is our response to your request for ABC… or the sycophantic, “Thank you for the opportunity to submit this proposal.” Both are a 1980s old-style way of starting an executive summary; boring and lazy to boot.

(2) Your Unique Point Of View About Their Situation

• As part of your opening statement, you want to home in on one or two of the strategic challenges or objectives your solution will overcome or enable.
• You mustn’t regurgitate what they already know – like copy and paste what they write about regarding their challenges or objectives in the RFP or elsewhere. Show you've done your homework about their operations. And then delight and surprise the reader by offering insight from your perspective. (Very few tech vendors do this in their executive summaries so you will engender respect and trust if you do).
• Don’t mention your company or solution yet, talk about the capabilities the buyer is looking for from a vendor. For example: “…However, with COVID further unbalancing the retail sector, shifting focus to your new product lines will let you target customers beyond merchants and sellers, and will protect international expansion plans of your core payment business.

(3) Summarise Strategic Benefits You’ll Bring

• At this point, introduce your company and show how its capabilities will support the client to meet its strategic goals.
• Make sure you understand what results they’re looking for and speak to them. You must directly link your capabilities to their business and technical imperatives.
• This section is also where you will introduce your unique promise of value. However, this can be dangerous if you haven’t tested this with the customer earlier. Are you sure, you know what they truly value? Is it to compete aggressively under the radar? Upend the industry with an innovative product? Slash operating costs while innovating rapidly? Unify and centralise operations to make them nimble? Empower teams and customers through automation? Diversify? Protect their IP and make them untouchable? Whatever the business value is that they're seeking to leverage from tech, find out and be sure.
• Let’s say your client is a healthcare provider that wants to become the most forward-thinking healthcare operator while dramatically cutting costs. Your promise of value might read like this: “As a healthcare provider passionate about improving people’s quality of life, investment in our artificial intelligence (AI) for hospitals, will leapfrog you into the forefront of preventive medicine. Significantly, we estimate our solution will reduce your high administration costs anywhere between 30% to 60% within the first three to five years.”?

(4) Provide Proof

• The highest level of proof is customer success stories and testimonials.
• The best customer success stories are companies of similar size, and industry, and operate in a similar region or same country as the client in your current RFP.
• Other types of proof are number of customers, number of qualified staff, analyst rankings, and research supporting your claims.

(5) Your team: Bios And Experience

• In an executive summary, bios are one to two sentences long, and you should customise your team’s experience and qualifications to what the client is looking for in this proposal or tender response.
• If you only get one page to write your executive summary, write a brief bio on the lead program director and for the rest of the team say something like this, “Our supporting team are all SAP awarded experts who have more than 10 years of experience implementing complex ERP systems.”

(6) High-Level Solution Strategy

• This is where you summarise your solution strategy and inherent financial benefit. You must align it to the client’s overall business strategy or technical strategy (if the proposal is more focussed on that).
• If your executive summary is only one page, one to two sentences on the solution strategy is enough. If your executive summary is between 3 and 5 pages, several paragraphs or a page is fine.
• Unless a client’s internal IT team has written the RFP, a high-level solution strategy is not overly technical. It focusses on outcomes, especially financial and future benefits.
• Let’s say you’re offering a large retailer an online channel, the solution strategy might read like this: “To support your commitment to delivering amazing customer experiences 24/7, we offer a modern customer engagement solution based in the cloud with network capability. It comes with a fully-fledged sales solution capable of handling the entire sales cycle: pricing, quotes and orders. Benefits envisaged: increased sales from current customers, ability to penetrate new markets, and improved visibility of your entire customer engagement cycle, which will allow you to better anticipate and react to evolving customer demands.” Depending on your reader, they may not care about the actual digital platform you’ll use, but if they do, add that in. You can add other information like security, reliability and availability but be brief. Again, it depends on how influential the CIO and his team are in the decision-making process.
• It’s also important in this section to cover the cost-benefit of your solution as this will be something the CFO will closely review. Of course, this is difficult to do so it’s vital to be straightforward and conservative about financials because we all know it’s almost impossible to measure ROI. What you should avoid are fluffy, generic claims like, “boost cost efficiency”, “lower your overall IT expenses”, “minimise additional expenditures”, or improve cost agility”. Stick with facts and be clear. My point is when it comes to IT investments right now, decision-makers will be scrutinising the financial benefits. If you can prove this, then laying it out in a simple table without succumbing to weasel words, will be well regarded.

(7) How Will You Deliver?

• This is about explicitly articulating how you will deliver: resources/people, plans/schedules and timelines—the ‘how’ is tricky as you need to be specific enough yet not too detailed. There can be no doubt of your capability or capacity to deliver under tight timeframes, or when the going gets tough as it can when implementing complex solutions requiring strong collaboration between buyer and vendor.
• If room, insert up to three examples of successful project delivery, like so, “Implemented digital solutions for a global retailer in 2019, moving 50% of their operations from bricks and mortar to online. Delivered within six months, on-time and on-budget.”
• I would spend more time talking about the how and delivery method than the what or solution strategy because the risk of project derailment and cost over-runs for tech deployments is high in people’s minds.

(8) Close: Prove Your Commitment

• Don’t’ finish with a bland sign-off extolling the virtues of your company or solution, instead use the concluding paragraph to reaffirm how you will help the client overcome their toughest challenges or fulfil ambitious goals.
• Resist using lazy and fluffy one-liners like, “we’re committed to your success”. Prove it. For example, “We’re so committed to your success that we’ve secured our most experienced project director who has managed complex digital projects for five of our top 10 global clients. Additionally, your executive sponsor for this project is our CEO because we see you as an important strategic partner.”
• Have your CEO include a quote specifically saying the buck stops with her/him and promising some added value or risk-sharing.
• Offer extra value via leadership roundtables, customer events or access to insightful industry research.
• If you’re a small to medium-sized tech company, your proof of commitment can centre on you being nimble and able to pivot to meet your client’s needs quickly. Like larger vendors, you still need to provide specific assurances about how you will do this. For example, offer six yearly, all-day strategy sessions with a respected expert to help your clients rethink or flex their business model.

What About Price?

Depending on the complexity of the solution and the style of the RFP, many clients will not ask for the price or will request you not include it in the executive summary. However, if they do ask for the price, insert it after the solution and just before you close. Keep it high-level.

What Else Makes For A Really Excellent Executive Summary?

• Always write your first draft as an outline. It will help you order your ideas better.
• Once you have a solid outline, test it with others and get their ideas as this will improve your persuasive argument. Don’t ask for feedback once you’ve written your executive summary in full – reviewers, especially senior people might tear apart your thinking. It’s much easier to start again when your executive summary is a high-level draft.
• Once you've written your narrative in full, go back and spend triple the time finessing your opening paragraphs and reworking or reshaping your closing paragraphs. How you begin and end is super-important because it’s what readers will remember the most.
• Proofread multiple times. Do this yourself and get a fresh pair of ideas to help you also.

Conclusion

I’ve used this basic formula for over 20 years helping sales teams win deals whether it was for tenders valued at $200,000 or $200M. Whatever the value of the proposed solution, this formula has a lot of room for creativity. No two executive summaries I’ve co-authored or guided looked the same.

Following this formula will make it easier for you to write executive summaries you'll be proud to submit.

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This article was originally published on the now-retired relatable.IT blog.

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