Small Business Proposal Development

There are companies who marry, and make a good living teaching very complete and functional proposed development methodology. This methodology is the proposed menu of "best practices". If you are one of the big ones such as Northrop, IBM, Booz and a few others, you can follow the best practices and achieve great results, because they have the resources and strength needed to finance their bench. You can begin before the RFP is issued because you have a group of marketing and sales, whose task is to develop long-lead time accounts. And you more than likely have sales engineers whose job is to develop solutions on spec.

In smaller companies each must be directly responsible, there is no budget for sales and marketing teams and sales engineers. All customer invoices and very often people are working on a customer site. When a new opportunity is identified there is no one to work properly until the blows RFP. Note that the company is not 'caught flat-footed shot or provided outside the CBD are just doing everything we can with the resources available. Why Small Company Inc. wants to grow and prosper they sent people to be trained by the companies that blend the best practices and would like to emulate those who wish to become. All that Big Company Inc. could have been done for a year or more to get ready to bid, Inc. Small Company now seeks to squeeze into a period of 30-120 days. It would be stressful to do this once or twice a year, but some companies go through this insanity forever.

The few good people who are stuck on the teams proposed burn out fast. Between the proposal and the customer and the responsibilities of companies that work quality suffers, the proposal, the customer or the company. Good practices should not be abandoned or rewritten specifically for small businesses. And 'the responsibility of small business to identify best practices that will get the biggest bang for the buck, when there are very few dollars. If you only have 30 days to develop the solution, assemble the team and prepare the proposal of something to be left out. For example, the storyboard is a very good technique when used properly. However, the day is issued the RFP is not the day to begin to teach the technique to a group that has never used or is reluctant to use it, because they never proved its worth. No time for more formal reviews.

Structuring the review cycle to reflect the situation compressed. Incorporates past performance and the team is also an obstacle for many companies. A Project Manager who has had to adapt the description of the project five or six times in the last month will not be real excited about having to make a seventh time. CV follow the same pattern. The solution is to accept reality and the design of processes and procedures to reflect it. You can still go to your meetings and Association say they follow the procedures to the letter, but in the long run you will have reduced the cost BandP, produced better proposals and helped to keep the best people to not burn them in an attempt to keep pace with the big boys....