The Place of Assumptions in Business Proposals

While a lot of hard facts has to be included in your business proposals, there are times when assumptions are allowed by the other party. It is important you have an understanding as to when it is allowed because it could ruin your chances of clinching that deal if used indiscriminately or where it is not applicable.

Know What They Want

The first thing is to know what your clients want. They may be looking for cold facts so applying assumptions in your projections may not just work in your favor. The fact is the nature of the deal you are writing a proposal over can influence the degree of assumption you are allowed to have and include in the project. If the project is information dependent, you must make sure your permutations are in accordance with what everyone would agree with respect to the indices being applied. Below are possible areas where assumptions can be allowed.

Where No Real Data Is Available

This must be something that is obvious to the other parties. You might be asked to submit a proposal on a web application that they want built and there might be no real data on how people will react to such an application. This would be obvious to them and the nature of what they want you to do may have eliminated the need for such data in the first place. However, assumptions in such a situation may be overlooked because they already have a sense of what the web application should be able to do since they know how they want to deploy it.

Where Both Parties Can Logically Accept The Assumption

Some assumptions are reasonable because the other party or the people you are submitting the proposal to do not see it as being something that is impossible to be realistic. Logical assumptions can be a very persuasive tool that can get people to see your side of the argument. Logical assumptions can be used to defend a timeline of the project deployment, benchmarking or milestones. You may be asked to defend why your suggested milestones are too far apart and your argument could be that you want to give room for both testing and corrections. 

That is, you are assuming that issues will developing after the testing that will need you to fine tune, so leaving a room for that before the next milestone will be in order. Your assumption that something might go wrong and you will need to leave room to correct it as it has to do with the web application is a logical assumption. Testing is designed to check the integrity of what you are building and done in such a way that whatever could be wrong will show itself. Logical assumptions can also be applied in other areas of your proposal but like we have mentioned, they have to be something that will make sense to the other party.

Where Stated Facts Allows For Extrapolation

There are some facts that can allow you to take an assumed leap forward. That is, you can say some things about the unknown from the known even when there is no definite connection. Extrapolation gives you a leeway to use assumptions in your business proposals. The more grounded the facts, the more you can draw assumptions from it. 

This is slightly different from logical assumptions, like the one that has to leave room for errors and correcting them because it is the facts that back it up. The other party may not hold you accountable even when it did not happen as assumed because they would have agreed based on the proven facts on ground.

Care should be taken when using assumptions in your business proposals. You should be aware that in a competitive market or where you have others vying for the same project, the people that called for the submission of proposals would naturally want to go for those who can factually backup their claims and projections. As a rule, it should be avoided whenever that is possible and only used sparingly. 

There are areas where it might even be a taboo on your part, like pricing and experience. There should be nothing less than facts when it comes to the area of experience even when you have not directly taken that kind of assignment. You could reference projects you have done that are similar but be clear about how they relate and why an experience in such an area would serve to help you in the new area you are submitting such a proposal.

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