Your proposal can lose for a whole lot of reasons. Some are out of your control. Most proposers, however, carry their fates in their own hands; whether they win or lose depends in great part on how they conduct their proposal writing activities. Over the years I have found that there are certain key elements

Proposal writing is one of the most crucial skills in selling to government. But how do you win in these competitive situations? More proposals are rejected than accepted. Invariably, price is blamed as the villain, but in fact, price is rarely the only consideration and many times not even the main one. Proposing the lowest

BOOST SUCCESS BY TREATING PROPOSAL WRITING AS A STRATEGICALLY IMPORTANT PROJECT The state and local government IT market is huge: More than $100 billion was spent in 2000 by states, cities and counties on information systems and services. And part of this market — the world of outsourcing, systems integration, consulting and hundreds of different

What’s your impression of how the evaluation process goes? Do you imagine that the evaluator reads proposal after proposal until he happens upon the one that makes him stand up and say, “Eureka! This is it!” You know that isn’t how it goes. Yet, chances are you write your proposals as if you think that’s how

Proposals are a fact of life. To get public-sector business, you must submit proposals. In fact, most public agencies are unable to award contracts above some limit, such as $100,000, without a competitive procurement process. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how good your products are, or how many similar projects you’ve completed on time and within

Here’s a pop quiz. A proposal is: A. A technical document B. A marketing document C. A sales document D. All of the above When I ask this question in the proposal classes I teach, I get a variety of answers. The technical people sometimes select A; after all, to them the purpose of a

This one’s for you marketing professionals. As your firm’s resident “proposal specialist,” do you ever find yourself frustrated because you know what the right thing to do is but no one seems to want to hear you say it? Do you ever wish people would use your expertise more fully, would seek your professional advice

The single most important element of a winning proposal is a clear set of direct benefits the customer will receive by selecting you. Nothing is more important than that. Your proposal will win or lose on that alone. You must remember this crucial fact: From the customer’s perspective, most firms in a given competitive procurement

It’s impossible to give a description of how each evaluation process works; every firm and agency that evaluates proposals has its own way of doing it. But it is possible-and very useful-to explain a few things about proposal evaluation in general. For any given procurement, the customer receives a pile of proposals in response to

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