You have about 30 seconds to grab your customer’s interest and keep it. To do this they have to understand at a glance how your solution addresses their pressing problems. Your whole offering should be able to be described on a single page. Don’t forget – you are selling, not describing – so the benefits of your solution to the customer is all that is required.
Forget what everyone else has been telling you. Here are the key components that should form your executive summary:
- The document template. Very important, don’t use a standard document. Create one for the job. It has to be easy on the eye and easy to navigate. Keep the text plain with “sans serif” fonts. The first words a reader sees have to emphasise how the customer’s primary hot button is addressed by your solution. The remainder of the benefits offered should be listed, separately, but in an obvious way too. There should be only one diagram on this page – your best killer diagram which describes graphically with text annotations how your solution answers the exam question. There should be no “blocks” of text on this page – block text is difficult to read easily. Work at keeping sentences short with efficient use of simple language and use lists and bullets to get more information across.
- Customer Hot Buttons. If you don’t know what these are – or can’t develop a short list to work with – you deserve to lose. Use all the people in your organisation who have had contacts with anyone in the customer community to brainstorm what they are. For complex requirements there are multiple customer stakeholders and each will have a different take on the most important hot button. However, the single most important hot button should become obvious either from the customer requirement document or from the contacts your people have had with the customer. Produce a prioritised list of hot buttons and use the top one to create the first words (2-3 sentences) your customer will read. Solution benefits addressing the next 5 – 7 hot buttons are highlighted separately in a bulleted list of single, short, sentences.
- Your Best Killer Diagram. Killer diagrams is an important enough topic to warrant a standalone blog post. For the purpose of an Executive Summary, however, the diagram should describe your whole solution in terms of the customer hot buttons and each benefit offered by your solution which addresses each hot button. This is not easy to do and is worth investing a lot of time in. Brainstorm initial sketches and ideas with your proposal team – and others not involved in the proposal – before fleshing one of them out with someone skilled in producing graphics. Pictures are said to be worth a thousand words. To have impact and maintain the interest of the reader, these words need to be able to be read and their meaning easily understood in just a few seconds. The right diagram will do this for you.
The ideal complete executive summary should be on a single page. It can be done. Some very complex businesses are summarised in this way when businesses are being floated on stock exchanges, sold or if investment is being sought. Don’t forget that the meat on the bones is provided by the remainder of the proposal. If people want detail they know where to find it.
Find out more about good Executive Summary writing here.
Twitter
LinkedIn
