Know-How Exchange : Strategy

In the market research industry, the job of writing proposals usually falls on a junior researcher. Draft proposal then must be approved or corrected by a senior. Sales people are usually not involved in developing proposals since ours, as is yours, a very technical field and it show quickly when you don’t know your stuff.

That said, at our company we attempt to inject a marketing angle into each proposal we develop. We attempt to have at least one ‘benefit’ at the end of each section. What also works well for us, is not only mentioning how ‘this or that’ will benefit your firm; we also attempt to find weaknesses in methodologies that we know our competitors typically suggest. I am positive that we have won many contracts not only because we sold our services well, but also because we “discredited” proposals of others.

I would also suggest using color, graphics, photos, charts etc. to drive point home –if we spend all this time and effort on a ‘free’ proposal, just imagine what we will do when you pay us!

Luke Zukowski

If you do enough of them it is basically cut and paste from past ones. Very few RFPs we receive have someone we've never seen before.

Michael

I went to a meeting of
https://www.smps.org//AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home

recently and their marketing folks write their plans.

If you are not hitting at least 60% of your proposals, check out your go/no questions.

A simple way to start is something we've done in the past by simply using a standardised Word template document. This contains standard descriptions of things like quality control, previous clients etc and content from previous proposals and standard text and prompts for the proposal writer. The template itself grows over time as new areas and issues are covered. Authors delete the parts they don't want.

This means the authors just need to work on 20-30% that is specific to the tender in question.

This has the benefit of being an organic document which means it doesn't take too much effort to get it started - simply strip a few pre-existing proposals into the standard format - whilst ensuring it can grow and adapt with changing circumstances without needing technical resources for change. The level of change control on the template will depend on your business size and the number of people authoring.

The problems are that the template can get to be too big and that people stop reading what they think they've read before. For the too big problem, eventually it becomes a matter of creating a small bit of code to pick out the key document parts from a database, rather than using the cumbersome delete methodology. This is a relatively trivial piece of VBA/Access/File management. Any document management system should also be able to manage this.

Saul