Special offer from Learn to Write Proposals

There's never been a more important time to maximise your sales potential -  that means being able to demonstrate value in your proposals and at the same time create better proposals, faster. It's been an exciting year so far at Learn to Write Proposals with the development of e-learning content, our online proposal writing and business style guide and so much more to come with an online seminar series to support you in creating winning proposals. To reflect the new content offerings we've recently made some changes to our subscription and lifetime membership pricing. However, we want to offer an opportunity to readers of our newsletter to subscribe to Learn to Write Proposals at a significant discount on our new rates. There really is not a better time to treat yourself and your business to a Learn to Write Proposals membership. That's why until the end of September 2010 you can get 25% of any subscription or a lifetime membership. You can even use this discount to get a discount on individual items in our online shop. If you want a reminder on what's included, click here. To get your discount, use this coupon at checkout: ZGEWND If you have any questions, then don't hesitate to drop us a line. Learn to Write Proposals info@learntowriteproposals.com

Better Proposals = More Business

Prospect qualification for business proposals

Writing a business proposal is often a substantial investment for a business, whatever the size. It takes time and resources to produce and, as with any sale, there is a chance that the customer is going to say no.

So the opportunity has to be qualified - that is you need to detach emotion and objectively assess the likeliohood of success, then make the call whether or not to invest in the bid.

This objective assessment or qualification is often difficult for some people - for instance a salesperson who has spent time cultivating an opportunity.

But it has to be done to avoid a lot of time wasting. Qualifying out bad opportunities and concentrating on ones that you can win is one of the easiest things that you can do to improve sales success and therefore the success of your business. It's a technique that all sales staff should learn.

Learn to Write Proposals has a Prospect Qualification toolkit that helps evaluate objectively  opportunities. And we recommend that this is used throughout the sales cycle, not just once.

We have two tools to help you with your bid prospecting:

Bid/No bid tool
This tool allows you to make some preliminary decisions about whether it is worth spending time and effort responding to an opportunity. Although it is always tempting to go after everything, unless you can commit time and effort to writing a high quality, customer focussed proposal, you stand only a small chance of winning.

Probability engine
This tool is designed to help you with your bid and prospect qualification - to help you calculate the probability of winning an opportunity based on key business relationship factors weighted against their importance.

Each time you use the bid qualification engine ensure that you name and save the spreadsheet locally. Keep a version for each opportunity and throughout the bidding process re-visit the tool to re-qualify the opportunity - as you get more information and knowledge about the opportunity then check that it is still a viable opportunity - or alternatively that you are applying enough resources to ensure success.

There are fourteen key questions that you need to evaluate, each of which can be given a customised weighting based on the importance of your particular situation.

As this is a very important process, we have also decided to give this toolkit away free. We'll also be working on a improved paid-for version to track costs of the bid process and estimated project costs against value of the bid and the win probability to give you real-time likely return on investment of the bid.

You can download the free toolkit here:

http://www.learntowriteproposals.com/LTWP-Forums/LTWP-Forums/Proposal-Sales-and-Business-Questions/Free-Prospect-Qualification-Tool-Download.html