And many businesses will have thought "how does this help me get through the next 12 months?" to which I thought - well we want to make our situation better, but is our model of working much more sophisticated than buy now, pay later. I'm thinking about how we write proposals.
There is a tendency sometimes to throw mud at a wall when it comes to proposal writing. Write proposals and hope that a few of them stick. It's heavy investment in a sales or bid team that writes proposals when you know that you won't win all of them. But you need to win some to stay in business and pay for that time and investment in the sales process.
So what can we do to make things better for ourselves?
- It would be nice if we could produce better proposals for starters - that's got to help a little more of that mud stick.
- Produce our proposals quicker (but not if it's going to hurt quality) so that we can send more proposals to potential new clients or spend more time giving better service existing accounts (and trying to help them stay in business).
- Qualify leads better and quicker. Don't keep wasting time on that lead that doesn't have a prospective piece of business at the end of it.
There are other things of couse, but if we could do that we mght have a chance to look after our existing clients better, spend time only on opportunities that might benefit us and respond better to those opportunities.
It's not only the budget that made me think about this - it's why I started Learn to Write Proposals and developed tools and methodologies that enable you to do just that.
Isn't that what you want to be able to do?
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