How to Write a Transportation Proposal - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show you how transportation related proposals are created using Proposal Kit. The first thing you'll do is you start with a design theme. Now we have hundreds and hundreds of design themes and it's going to be split 50/50.

A lot of people will use our plain design Proposal Pack for Any Business. This is a page on our website that if you click the Proposal and Contract Products link and then click the Proposal Packs link you'll see this page. This is the plain design version so the templates are all black and white text with no extra graphics.

That's good for people doing government RFP responses and proposals where you don't need or want a flashy graphic design theme added or for people using our Professional Kit. For example, you can use this as your base Proposal Pack and build up your own graphic design theme branded to your own graphics, your own logo, your own designs, fonts, colors and so on. For people who want a premade design theme we have hundreds of pre–made designs.

If you scroll down, any company in any industry can use the general–purpose designs. If you just find one you like the design of, and these will be the conservative, modern, creative, conceptual and so on. Once you get into these categories down here, these are more industry specific design themes.

So for transportation if you're doing local cargo hauling maybe Transportation #1 might be a good design. If you're doing something that's safety related maybe Transportation #2. If you're doing limo services Transportation #6 might be a good one.

Cargo hauling or trucking might be using Transportation #7. International shipping, importing, exporting and so on maybe you might use Transportation #7. For ocean going related proposals maybe you might use #8.

For air cargo related Transportation #9. That might be good for local package delivery or so on. So that is how you pick a graphic design theme if we happen to have one you like the graphics and background design for.

Maybe your logo might look good on these pages. And every pack, say this is Transportation #7 on our website if you scroll down you see full–color blow–ups of what the Word document pages look like. So this will be the Transportation #7 Title Page and logo design and the actual templates in the package will be Word documents that have the same exact look.

These are screenshots of Word documents so the individual pages that make up your body of your documents will look like the design theme here. So we're going to illustrate the first proposal. We're going to create with our Transportation #5 design, that's the one that has more truck cargo hauling logistics type graphics in it and just a general purpose logo.

Your logo can be used in place of these in the actual Word documents and you can also swap out our photographs with your own and so on. If you have your own pictures of your own vehicles and so on in this case you just swap out our graphics with your own. So we have our Wizard software here loaded up with our Transportation #5 design.

So whatever design theme you've purchased will be the one that your documents will be created in using our software to create any kind of proposal, a business plan, report, study, quote or so on. You'll just click the Document Projects button, Add New Project and this Pick Documents button is where you will select all the chapters. Now on the screen there's a number of tabs.

All these tabs are just different ways to get chapters into your proposal project. This first tab will have the 40 most common pages most people will start with like a Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents, your Introduction or Executive Summary, Cost Summary, Estimate pages. And a page talking about Products or Services, your Company Background and so on.

Now there's over 2,000 possible chapters you can pick from. In this case since we're doing a transportation related proposal. You can scroll down this list you'll see on this drop down categories for Supply Chain, Logistics and Transportation.

A few pages of those and we can scroll through and check off chapters. If we need to talk about imports and exports for example. Shipping, dispatching and so on.

And just scroll through all these pages of transportation related chapters. We also have international chapters you might have to pick from. Whatever situation you are writing a proposal for.

Maybe you're doing transportation shipping for the food and beverage industry. You might need to pick some chapters related to that. Maybe you're in the energy or mining sector.

If you're doing product sales vs projects versus service sales you'll pick different types of chapters. If you're doing a grant RFP response for example. This is how to get to all the individual chapters.

Now a lot of people will want to start with a premade layout to get a better idea of how to get a document related to their situation a little faster. So this is why we have the Quick Start tab over here. Now there's hundreds of layouts for all sorts of different kinds of businesses and industries.

So we can just click the Search Import List button and type in a word like transportation. If you're doing a cargo or hauling type proposal just type in the word cargo or hauling. If you're doing imports exports type in the word import or export.

For logistics type in the word logistics and any layouts in the system will show up in the search. So I'm going to do a search on cargo since we have that trucking style design theme. Let's just say we're doing a cargo hauling services proposal so let's just select the Transportation Shipping Services layout.

This is a 17 page layout. Once we select it we just click Import Topics and this particular layout actually has pre–written sample content for it as well. So even though we have 600+ layouts we also have a couple hundred samples in the system of actual completed proposals.

This just happens to be a layout that also has some sample content so I'll say yes we'll import that. Now if we don't have a sample that exactly matches your business situation but we have a layout of chapters that just means instead of some content that's prewritten for you you might be able to edit the text a little quicker. You've just got some generic boilerplate content that you'll have to replace with your own actual information.

So you can see the list of chapters we have for this Cargo Hauling Proposal. We've imported that into our project. Now say we want to customize that list.

Not everybody is going to write the same proposal the same way for the same situation so you might want to add some additional chapters from the library or remove some chapters out of this layout. So say if you don't need to talk about Hazardous Materials you could just remove that chapter. We could go into this Transportation, Logistics, Supply Chain list of chapters.

Let's just say we want to add a Delivery Details page, we'll just click that and we can move the order of these pages around. So let's say we want to move the Delivery Details up a little bit. So once we have our selected set of chapters we have it all organized the way we want we just click the OK, Use Selected Templates button and we're back on the project page.

This title you give it is just for your own use so you can find it in the list of projects later. The next thing you do would be to fill in the Company Data and Client Data screens. So Company Data this is going to be the person writing the proposal so this would be your name and address information for the person writing the document.

The Client Data this will be name address contact information for the person you're writing the proposal to. We're just going to leave this blank for now and we'll leave the company data filled in with our information. Once you're done selecting the data you've selected the templates everything's organized in your project click the OK, Save Project button and just sit back and wait for the Wizard to generate this Word document for you.

So basically what it's doing is it's taking the list of chapters, its assembling those into a Word document in the graphic design theme that you chose. In this case it's also pulling in the pre–written sample content as well. Merging in the name and address data assembling everything into a single Word document that will be ready for you to just start editing in your word processor.

Ok, this document has been generated. Let's take a look at it. So now this is a complete Word document assembled from all the pieces.

You can see these tags have not been filled in because we did not actually type in the data into the Client Data screen but you can see where we had our name and address in the Company Data screen. Whatever you have in that screen gets put in here. This is all text so even if you don't fill stuff in or if you did fill it in you can change everything in the Word document itself.

Now we scroll down and we see the background design and now you'll see the pictures in this example are a little faded. That's just Word because our graphics are in the background header and Word will fade those out. So if you just double click into the header you actually see the full color design and full color is what you're going see when you print or export it to a PDF.

That is just how Word works. Now each of our design themes will have graphics like this, like the word Proposal. You can actually swap in your own logo here.

We also have 20 or so options so you can change this word Proposal to Business Plan or Report or Quote, whatever you want. As we scroll down we see each chapter and all the chapters after it in the Table of Contents and these chapters will all have a graphic header with the logo and some boilerplate text. In the case of a sample you can see the sample content got pulled in in place of our boilerplate text so some of these pages are already filled in a little bit with information you can just tweak a little faster than completely writing in your own text.

Now this document is ready to just finish editing in your word processor then when you're done you either print or save it as a PDF, upload it to a system, however you need to deliver it. Now we'll show another example and whatever Proposal Pack design theme you purchased is going to be what's in your list here of available styles. We just happen to have all of them in our demo here.

You'll just have usually one style or in the Proposal Kit Professional four designs and you can pick a fifth one of your choice. You can also customize these in the Wizard software in the Expert Edition and make your own design theme. So now we selected the Transportation #7 we are going to show an import/export transportation proposal.

So just like before I'm going to add a new project in the Document Project screen. I'm unchecking the Excel Dynamic Links here just to speed up the demos. If you have the Expert Edition in the Proposal Kit Professional any cost or schedule pages can be linked directly to an Excel spreadsheet so you can edit the spreadsheet and have the spreadsheet auto–update cost and schedule related pages in your Word document and there's other videos that go into detail on that feature.

Just like before if you have an import/export proposal or a business plan or report whatever you need to create you can just check off individual chapters or you can go straight to the Quick Start tab and do a search. I'm just going to search on the word import and you'll just narrow down the 600 some layouts to just the ones that are tagged with that word. We'll just pick the Import/Export Services layout of chapters and just like before this is a just a different set of chapters than the last proposal and they're all being pulled from the same library of 2000+ available chapter templates.

Now we import this and this one actually has pre–written sample content as well so we'll just say yes we'll import that. Now we can see the list of chapters. Now we can reorder these chapters just like before we can add new pages to the layout remove pages from the layout and so on.

We're just going to go with the stock layout and just like before we can enter in the Company Data and Client Data. Once we're all done with that save the project and let the Wizard build another Word document. Okay, now that document has been generated let's take a look at that.

See what it looks like. Now you can see the Transportation #7 design theme, our Table of Contents, all of our import/export related chapters and so on. Now I show you a third example using another design theme.

Now this could also be a combination of a transportation related proposal and a technical proposal so we're going to go with the Tech #9 design theme. This is our kind of technical drone looking design theme. Add a new project and we'll search on the word delivery.

Let's select this Drone Delivery of Supplies in a Disaster Area Proposal. This would be related to the transportation of materials so this type of proposal could cover a wide range of industries or situations so not necessarily just transportation this could also be a technical proposal, IT, it could be a government RFP response proposal. Click yes, again we'll just use the stock layout here save the project and you'll see another example.

All right now those document have been generated and just like before scroll down and now we see the Tech #9 design theme as the drone graphics and logo. The set of chapters for this situation and just like before you can just start filling in this Word document with your actual information. We'll show a fourth and final transportation–related proposal and this time we're going to use the Transportation #6 design theme.

This has been a common one used by limo service companies. Create a new project and we'll search for the word limo. If you do a search on a word and you don't find any layouts just change the word search to something that you think might be a main topic header or a word within a title.

If you need help just contact us and tell us what you're looking for. So we'll pick the Limo Transportation Services layout and once again this layout happens to have sample content as well. Okay now this last document has been generated and you can see the limo style graphic design and the limo service set of templates.

So this is how you can create any combination of a design theme and a set of chapters to cover any kind of transportation related proposal or business plan or report, study and so on. An RFP response, whatever you need, and this goes for any industry as well not just transportation. Proposal Packs, Wizard software, our templates, our template library and layouts cover every industry.