I've seen this ad on the back of our city taxis and it never fails to get my attention. The main aim in business writing is to communicate with the readers. So, if you can get the attention of your  target audience with your business proposal' title, introduction or executive summary, it would ensure that your proposal gets past the first hurdle of being considered for further reading. The business owner of catchcheatingspouse.my really knows how to get our attention. Watch out, cheating spouses!

Business Proposal Writing: What We can Learn from Roshan Thiran, CEO of Leaderonomics

I'm a firm believer of learning from the world around us. So, after reading Roshan Thiran's Don't Kill Your Talent in his column Talking HR in StarBiz (Thursday 27 March 2012), I asked myself: How can I use his ideas in business proposal writing? I won't delve into the details of the whole article, but I'll just focus on one quality that caught my attention that made me want to read it till the end.

How can a headline like "Don't Kill Your Talent" ever escape one's attention? Roshan is advocating that business leaders should also source their talents from within the organization. He opines that business organizations are unwittingly killing their own talents by not allowing their own people "to fulfil their potential". He suggests giving their "inexperienced" people a chance to realize their potential. His battle cry: Keep pushing your people outside their comfort zone. They need experiences".

OK, I digress. What has the headline got to do with your business proposal writing? It shows me how important it is to have a title that catches the attention of your readers. You may not write a stare-in-your-face title the way Roshan wrote his, but the same principle applies: you need a good title that tells your reader what you are proposing in your proposal. Just imagine Kentucky Fried Chicken with a bland or cliched tagline like The best chicken in town instead of the memorable It's finger lick'n good. Now, you're not going to write a proposal title like a tagline, which would be frivolous. But that's the point: get your readers' attention with an appropriate title so they will just nod their heads and say, "Hey, that's what I want".

Roshan Thiran is the CEO of Leaderonomics who describes  Leaderonomics as "a social enterprise focused on inspiring people to leadership greatness."