How to Write a Product Proposal for Funding?

The road to any successful business, more often than not, begins with a business plan or proposal. What many people tend to believe is that many businesses are simply started off the cuff and overnight. This is not true; businesses typically are well thought out and strategic endeavors that require a large amount of research and revisions before it is brought to life.

What this does is it allows people to understand a clear path as those who will be founding the business but a good business proposal will also encourage other stakeholders to take an interest and potentially share a part of the business and its growth.

Components of a Funding Proposal

Proposal is a written document to an individual or organization (the client) to provide your product and/or service or expertise to help that client solve a problem or handle a situation. Proposals must be persuasive. You must convince a client with your proposal writing, to use you, or, if you are applying for a grant, provide you with funding.

So, there are Several elements make up a proposal writing perfect. Not all the elements are necessary, depending on the size, scope, and formality of the proposal. You may want to check with the client to see what elements they’d like to see. However, here is a general format.

The Product Proposal must contain the following elements:

Business Case – weave your reality.

A business case is a proposal for a project, strategy, or course of action. It can be considered a pitch that gives stakeholders the information they need to make a decision to invest in a project. The following is content that is commonly included.?

Context

Who are you? Who do you work for? What’s the mission/vision of the company.

The client needs to know about the competence of your company/organization, your people.

This information has one primary objective: to highlight your ability to do the job. This is particularly important if you’re new to the client and even to the business. You may have a brilliant solution to their problems, but you’ve only been in operation for a short time.

Whereas, your competitor has been a client supplier for over a decade. What credibility do you have to do the job? A secondary, yet in many ways no less important factor, is building a partnership with the client.

Your Company/Organization

A brief account of your organization, its achievement and objectives. Background information includes.

• Your qualification and experience
• The kind of business you have carried on, where and for how long
• Projects you have carried out, especially those similar to the present proposal and the results you achieved
• Endorsements from third parties, especially satisfied clients, plus any articles written or awards received.
• A list of clients (often provided only on request)
• References (usually provided only on request)

Your People

This part names:

• Key people who will be involved in carrying out the proposal, their qualifications and their roles.
• Other major resources; e.g., if you’re doing a sales video, add the names of post-production companies and musicians whose work is important to the project.

Business Need & Vision

What is the product you are pitching – and what is its scope? Which markets are you targeting: existing or new? Think P.I.E.C.E.S. How is this aligned with the company’s long-term vision?

The business owner isn’t just working to satisfy his ego and the company doesn’t purely exist to earn money. A true business vision shows that the entrepreneur or the company strive to solve a meaningful problem. It is not about money, it is about solving a problem which makes the world a better place, which helps people.

• Budget: Why should investors/managers trust you? Let the data do the talking, think numbers, feasibility, cost-benefit analysis. Use the Team Charter.

Depending on the industry, budgets are either broken down by line item or acceptable as a lump sum.?Request for Proposals?for equipment and supplies may be acceptable as a lump sum. Request for Proposals for projects and services usually require bidders to break down their budget into cost areas.

In our theory a focal investor considers investing in a company. Trust affects the likelihood that investors receive get their returns in case of success.

Product Vision & Product Vision Box

A product vision, or product vision statement, describes the overarching long-term mission of your product. Vision statements are aspirational and communicate concisely where the product hopes to go and what it hopes to achieve in the long term.

Product Personas

Businesses build products to solve specific problems for specific groups of people in specific aspects of their lives. It requires a thorough understanding of those groups: what motivates them, what challenges they face, what goals they have, how they view themselves, what types of messages they find persuasive (and which ones they find off-putting), etc.

Product Scope

Product scope refers to the features or individualities of a product. Product scope is the actual tangible product while considering design, function, and component parts. It determines the upcoming marketing tactics, profit goals, and terrain saturation.

Project & Product Roadmap (Timeline & dependencies)

A product roadmap is used to communicate the product’s strategic path to achieve business goals. Product roadmaps can be used by product teams at diverse organizations. Product teams within the companies can use product roadmaps to plan their work and easily able to elaborate product strategic timeline.

The Project Appendix

?An appendix is a place to put any additional information which you believe might be useful for the client to know but is not necessary in the main body of the proposal, e.g., annual reports, bulletins, drawings.

MAKE ALL AREA EQUALLY STRONG?If one area is weaker than another, evaluators or the client may simply rule you out of the running, never looking at your great idea to solve their problem. So make sure you have spent sufficient time on all areas of the Request for Proposal/Proposal Request, not just those you consider most important.