Follow along as I craft an RFP executive summary example

I recently wrote an article on how to write an executive summary that will give you the best chance to win your request for proposal (RFP). It’s a riveting read! I included a template in that article to give you a head start. Now I’d like to draft an RFP executive summary example with you using that template.

Now I’m not suggesting that you create War and Peace here, but there are some key elements you need to include. And, as I mentioned in the other article, follow Dr. Tom Sant’s guidelines for persuasive writing, namely following his NOSE acronym:

• Needs: Demonstrate your clear understanding of the prospect’s business problems. Only by demonstrating that you truly understand the customer’s specific problems, and that you understand the business payoffs of solving those problems, are you qualified to recommend a solution.
• Outcomes: Confirm the results they will achieve when their problems are solved.
• Solution: Recommend a specific solution.
• Evidence: Illustrate how you’ve solved similar problems in the past and provide convincing proof of your track record.

Follow along or skip to the section you want to focus on:

“N” of NOSE: Understanding your prospect’s needs
“O” of NOSE: Surfacing desired outcomes
“S” of NOSE: Presenting the solution
“E” of NOSE: Providing evidence of your solution’s validity,
Conclusion: Sign off with a thank you

I recommend opening the template in a separate window and reviewing this RFP executive summary example in parallel with the instructions included in the template. It’s a richer experience.

Also, note that I created the example using a fictional software company (“Paradocx”) responding to another fictional company’s RFP (“ACME”). While Paradocx is a complete fiction, ACME is loosely based on a running gag in Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons—but still a complete fiction.

RFP executive summary example: Read, copy, and make it your own

The first thing you’ll notice in the RFP executive summary example is that I’ve dubbed it an executive briefing instead of an executive summary. “Brief” is more active and meets the expectation of the executive, the intended audience of this document. The intention is to inform and persuade the executive, not attempt to abbreviate and condense the response into a couple of pages. Most of the time, the executive will only read this brief instead of the whole RFP, so it has to be right on the money.

Executive Briefing

Thank you for inviting Paradocx to participate in ACME Global’s RFP for your time travel software initiative. The entire Paradocx team is eager to partner with ACME, and having carefully considered your requirements, we are very confident we can deliver a solution that will deliver significant efficiencies and competitive advantage to your organization.
In this executive briefing, we outline how our solution will address ACME’s stated requirements and deliver on your desired outcomes. We provide a high-level overview of Paradocx’s recommended solution, before then providing justification as to why Paradocx is the right choice for ACME.

“N” of NOSE: Understanding prospect’s needs

Our Understanding of ACME’s Needs

Safe, on-time delivery of overly complex devices intended to capture roadrunners—no matter how remote the location or how much TNT is included—is essential to maintaining ACME’s perceived value and satisfying subscribers. In our conversations with your team, you have informed us that you currently face several challenges with ACME’s shipping and packaging services, including:

Skyrocketing customer churn rate
Simply put, when deliveries don’t arrive on time, customers are rushed, mistakes are made, and roadrunners escape. Dissatisfied customers are quick to terminate subscription services, especially with your primary competitor, Zambezi, offering incentives to do so.

Fewer new subscriptions
ACME market share has dropped by an average of 6% year-over-year since 2017. Influx of competitors such as Zambezi has created a price war over scarce consumer dollars. ACME’s safety reputation has been damaged by social media coverage of unplanned TNT explosions.

Response times slowed by lack of data, poor decision-making
Unexpected supply chain delays surprised ACME during the pandemic crisis of 2020 and 2021. Siloed data and legacy systems that could not be integrated blocked the packaging department’s ability to find new materials in a timely manner. Panic buying of sawdust and styrofoam peanuts resulted in a dangerous hazardous waste debacle.

Too many missed on-time delivery milestones
Inability to find replacement parts for Rube Goldberg contraptions delayed delivery on more than 17% of orders in Q2 2021. Lack of communication with shipping resulted in promises of delivery times and sites based on 2018 manufacturing times that could not be matched in 2021.

“O” of NOSE: Surfacing desired outcomes

ACME’s Desired Business Outcomes

By implementing ACME’s Time Travel SaaS Platform, you wish to benefit in several ways in addition to addressing the above challenges. The desired outcomes you shared with us include:

Reduce churn while increasing customer retention
By resetting the timeline and meeting shipping deadlines for 90% of transactions tagged as “late arrival,” ACME will eliminate cause for switching services while limiting risk to reputation.

ACME will also be able to proactively alter shipping deadlines based on navigation of the near future. Headcount in the shipping and packaging department can remain constant until customer onboarding rate outpaces customer churn rate.

Distance ACME further ahead of the competition
Next-level customer rewards programs will make for a difficult choice if customers want to take their business to competitors such as Zambezi. Additionally, improved response, accurate deliveries, and better overall service will make leaving ACME even less appealing.

Many Paradocx customers have related to us that even minor interruptions in the timeline allow them to gain a toehold against aggressive competitors. Like a loud noise distracts an angry dog, time travel disrupts competitors’ momentum and returns the advantage back to our customers.

Accelerate response time

Responding to complex order requests to remote destinations takes time, especially if fireworks are involved or the destination is not a physical address. Consequently, roadrunners have already passed the target zone by the time deliveries arrive, resulting in frustrated customers.

A time travel software solution can deliver significant efficiencies to address these concerns, as well as significantly improving the probability of upgrading orders to increase average order value.

Guarantee delivery to desired destination, no matter how remote

There’s nothing scarier than receiving a delivery request to a pin on a map. No address. No roads. And barely any landmarks to establish a frame of reference. Despite their name, roadrunners don’t always spend their time on main highways. Coyotes need to follow the scent no matter how treacherous the terrain.
With ACME’s Time Pause functionality, shippers can freeze time for up to 72 minutes and reroute our GPS satellite to the delivery site. From there, it’s just a matter of drawing a topographic map of the area and letting our AI-enabled drone army strategize a delivery plan.

“S” of NOSE: Presenting the solution

Paradocx’s Recommendation for ACME

Having diligently studied your requirements and challenges, stated above, we strongly urge ACME to invest in Paradocx’s Time Travel SaaS Platform.

Paradocx’s market-leading solution was designed with customer retention and improving service quality as priorities. Paradocx’s founders were career time travelers and therefore have firsthand experience of how to reset timelines while managing chaos risk. Simply put, our solution was designed by time travelers to help you control time.

Consequently, Paradocx will eliminate ACME’s past mistakes so you can reduce customer churn and begin increasing subscriber revenue. The core capabilities of our solution are highlighted in the graphic below:

Paradocx’s Key Functionality – An Overview

Analysis of the Past:

Without time-traveling software designed to analyze past transactions and identify the flashpoints that undermined your intended customer experience, you can spin your wheels for years. Even if you are lucky enough to find the right transactions, you still need the ability to travel backward and alter the outcome.

Paradocx’s Analysis of the Past allows you to alter only the outcomes that matter so that you don’t waste resources on those that don’t. This functionality also limits your risk of causing chaos or possibly opening a wormhole.

Timeline Correction:

Some say that there is inherent danger in changing the past and that doing so becomes an exercise in butterfly effect management. We agree.
Butterfly effect management is the difference maker in timeline correction. Following Analysis of the Past—when we’ve identified the most impactful flashpoints—our patented timeline correction process reverses results while limiting butterfly effect risk. Moving forward, butterfly effect management will result in fewer timeline corrections with future planning.

Future Planning:

It’s not enough to change the past and live in the now. Maintaining competitive performance for the long haul requires future planning based on insight into tomorrow.
In addition to identifying upcoming service interruptions and opportunities for customer rewards, future planning also monitors what will happen with Zambezi and other competitors. This level of insight is not available anywhere else because of Paradocx’s hold on a proprietary fixed point in spacetime.

Pause for Accuracy:

Customer expectations are off the charts. Packaging and/or shipping deadlines are bearing down. You’ve already used your monthly allotment of timeline corrections. Is there anything else you can do to accelerate response time?

Engage pause for accuracy, an up-to-72-minute dimensional freeze-frame in which you can still move around freely. Seems like a paradox. We thought so too until we accidentally developed it 7,000 years from now.

Data Security:

Customer data is the lifeblood of your business at ACME. Without pinpoint accurate location coordinates, payment information, and certification data at your fingertips, your deliveries are at risk.
We recognize how vital your data is and want to assure you that we’ve taken measures to keep it secure now, in the past, and in the future. And if there is a catastrophic breach? We’ll perform a timeline correction (at no extra cost) to fix it. Our security protocols meet the following standards:

• SOC II
• GDPR
• ISO 27001

System Uptime:

At ACME, the shipping and packaging processes are mission-critical to your end-to-end services, so your chosen solution needs to recognize that fact. Paradocx is as reliable as it is secure.

Our Time Travel SaaS Platform is 100% cloud-based with redundancy provided by ultra-reliable Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting infrastructure.

In fact, Paradocx has achieved 99.98% uptime since our inception, and we considered deploying timeline correction to bring it to 100%. However, future planning indicated doing so increased the possibility of an event horizon forming in the Southern Ocean if we had. Barring the possibility that doing so may end existence as we know it (in which case our services are moot), you can be confident that Paradocx will always be up when you need it.

“E” of NOSE: Providing evidence of your solution’s validity

Why should ACME partner with Paradocx?

We completely understand that ACME has a choice of vendors with whom you will partner. So, with several outwardly similar solutions on the marketplace to choose from, why should ACME select Paradocx?

ACME asked us to explain clearly how we are different from our competitors. While there are many differences between us and our competitors, we’ll highlight the four that are most relevant to ACME’s needs.

ACME’s Key Differentiators

We’re all still here

Paradocx is the only time travel software provider that has been used by our competitors to save existence from annihilation. The physics and mathematics driving our software development actually enable time travel capabilities for all our competitors. We invented it and made it openly available to the world.

Results are guaranteed

We’re not the largest, most valuable corporation in the world for nothing. Time is every company’s most valuable asset. What you do with it determines your success. It just so happens that we control it.

User-friendly, low-risk interface

All animations, binary songs, and gravitation wave rhythms are maneuverable through our proprietary touchscreen interface. Unlike competitive solutions that rely on messages in bottles and subliminal messaging through high-frequency radio waves, our insights come through loud and clear. And no timeline corrections can be made without judgement from the World Time Panel.

Only provider with privacy promise

Paradocx searches across time with full encryption with no need to rely on disguises to avoid butterfly effect events. At no time will any customer know that you peeked back or forward at them. Deja vu was eliminated with our 2.0 upgrade in 2019.

What Paradocx’s Customers Are Saying…

Paradocx is consistently the highest-rated solution in the market. But don’t just take our word for it. Here are some soundbites provided by three Paradocx customers.

Daffy’s Duck & Cover

Birdswing Emporium

A Small World

ROI

Based on ACME’s expected outcomes, the unlimited user pricing model that is optimal for your business, and the fact that we will perform a timeline correction for any time required for onboarding, we created the following ROI estimates.

Day 30: 10% ROI

Day 90: 50% ROI

Year 2: 248% ROI

We came to these numbers using our ROI calculator, which includes the following factors:

• Avg. price per Rube Goldberg device
• Avg. margin for shipping and packaging costs
• Estimated customer churn reduced to 3% by day 90
• Year-over-year increase in subscription rate f 7.3%

Paradocx Overview

Why choose Paradocx to help you with this important business initiative? Founded so far in the future that you don’t need to worry about it, we brought this technology back to 21st century earth through an Einstein-Rosen bridge to make a difference in how humans work, live, and play. Our platform has been designed and built from the ground-up by an extremely experienced and talented team of individuals who understand firsthand the demands of conducting business in linear time.

We are a financially strong, vibrant business, backed by unlimited financial resources and control of time. As the market leader, we provide time travel services to more than half of the Fortune 100.

We are consistently the highest-rated vendor on independent review sites such as TARDIS. We are the only time travel software endorsed by MIT and NASA.

ACME Customers

Paradocx provides services to more than half of the Fortune 100, nearly two-thirds of the Comprend Global 100, more than three-quarters of Forbes Global 2000, and a fruit farm in southwest Idaho.

Conclusion: Sign off with a thank you

Conclusion

Once again, thank you for considering Paradocx as a partner for ACME relative to your time travel software needs.

In conclusion, everyone at Paradocx is excited at the prospect of working with ACME, and eagerly anticipating welcoming you to the fast-growing list of Paradocx customers. We will work extremely hard to build a strong, long-term partnership focused on helping you achieve your customer churn and subscription objectives and exceed your expectations at every point along the way.

Next Steps

Download the complete executive summary example here. These templates will be a huge time saver for you moving forward. It takes a little longer to write the first one, but you’ll be able to rattle off those that follow in no time.

To learn more about the value of templates in and how RFP software can accelerate your workflow, schedule a demo now. You can also see how Genpact’s bid team uses RFPIO® LookUp to download templates directly from their Content Library in this article.