Like your bid or proposal, it’s a way of guiding your client from where they are now to where they need to be – and making it clear why they need your help in getting there. Your executive summary is like a miniature version of your entire bid or proposal. So how do you summarise a carefully argued document – which can sometimes run to dozens of pages – into a one- or two-page executive summary? And doing that could be a costly mistake. This could be a problem, as often this crucial section ends up being something of an afterthought: a few paragraphs or pages that get dashed off when the author is already exhausted from writing the ‘real’ proposal. More than this, these readers will often be key decision-makers. However well-written the rest of your bid or sales proposal is, many people will only have the time (or motivation) to read the executive summary. And how you structure your executive summary is key to how well it works. The executive summary of your bid or proposal is arguably the most important part of the entire document.
