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Watching TV growing up and seeing thousands of advertisements every day has ill prepared people for content marketing. They practice sales in writing when they should be doing marketing. People only procure contracts for services and solutions from companies they trust. Content marketing is about earning trust. Sales requires trust. See the difference?  If you want a high conversion rate at closing sales, don’t make your pitch until you’ve established that trust.

What is "content marketing?" Content marketing uses the publishing of material to achieve your marketing goals. It can be used to support inbound or outbound marketing. Content marketing has become extremely popular because of the web, where it is used primary for inbound marketing. Companies post content that brings visitors to their websites. Because of the growth of the web, sometimes this is the only form of content marketing that you hear about, with som

Quantifying what you need vs. what you have First you need to quantify what you need and compare it to what you have. You can do this in a table if you want to break it down in detail, such as by multiple locations or by labor categories. But comparisons are better made visually. One way to do this is with a pie chart: The goal is to show that the gap is really small and you already have the vast majority of what you need.  &#

IntroductionEven when you provide the same offering as your competitors, you can differentiate your proposal by demonstrating that you will do a better job of achieving their goals. Of course, it will help to understand what those goals really are.  Consider the following questionsWhat should you say about the answers in your proposal? How do you define success, based on the requirements and goals described in the RFP or your customer awareness

People buy from people they know and trust. But sometimes they don’t know any of the vendors who respond to the RFP (which does happen, more in some markets than others) or they’ve had bad experiences with the vendors they do know. Trust is a complicated thing. You don’t achieve trustworthiness by claiming it (as in stating that you are a “trusted supplier” or anything similar).  You don’t achieve trustworthiness by sincerely feeling that you are trustworthy, or t

Features and benefits are often presented in a table in a proposal. But they are also addressed throughout the text. The following list can help you call out the things that matter most about your offering, its attributes, or its specifications.  What really matters though is how the customer is going to benefit from the presence of a feature. But how the customer benefits depends on the evaluation criteria and the customer’s needs and preferences. Some things can

Ingredients What performance metrics will you use? What is the baseline you’ll use to measure performance against?  Will you use any industry benchmarks for comparison? What are your minimum performance standards? How will you collect and track metrics data? How will you record or document the collection of metrics data? How you will analyze metr

Sometimes the customer needs you for ongoing services. Sometimes they need something created. And sometimes they need help solving a problem. When customers are procuring services, they face a lot of intangibles. When companies sell services, their capabilities may only be limited by their ability to hire people to do the work. This creates an environment in which the contractors tend to pursue anything they can and all look the same to the customer. It doesn’t he

Ingredients What steps will you take to get ready to start the project?   Will you take steps to prepare before the contract is even awarded? What is the schedule for implementing the plan and its duration? What hardware, software, equipment, purchases, procedures, and staffing that you will put into place during the Transition Period? What staff that you will use to implement the Transiti

Ingredients What deliverables will you produce? What is the benefit to the customer for each? What specific requirements will each deliverable meet? How will you manage the production of deliverables? What standards will you use to evaluate the quality of deliverables? What is your schedule for delivery? What is the review/acceptance process for

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Circumstance Sometimes the customer tells you exactly what to bid. Other times, they tell you what the problem or need is and ask you to propose a solution. When they tell you what to bid, everybody is bidding the same thing and it’s hard to stand out from the pack. Approaches When everybody is bidding the same thing, to establish a better value you must either: Offer more than what they asked for. If you focus on

Here is the proposal recipe I already have related to quality:  "Quality" as a subject could have many more recipes on specific aspects. For example, here is a graphic that could turn into a recipe on Quality Improvement Projects. In fact, it could become several separate recipe topics based on the topics in the graphic. https://www.rsna.org/uploadedFiles/RSNA/Content/Science/Quality/Storyboards/2013/Bankes-LLQSETU4A.pdf

Circumstance Sometimes the customer tells you exactly what to bid. Other times, they tell you what the problem or need is and ask you to propose a solution. When they ask for a solution it can be hard to decide what to offer. Approaches Teach them what matters. They have to figure out how to compare apples and oranges. Instead of leaving it to them to figure out, you can help them by pointing out what matters. And if in your proposal they

When you are a contractor, sometimes deadlines are missed, budgets are exceeded, or specifications go unmet. Sometimes it’s because of an oversight, bad estimates, or mismanagement. And sometimes it’s because the customer was unclear or changed their minds. Either way, your past performance record may suffer. Customer complaints, cure letters, or termination of a task can do irreparable damage to your ability to win future work. It can be worse when you are trying

Our approach to quality involves double checking the things that are necessary to win, in order to make sure they are right. The MustWin Process validates quality continuously instead of waiting for key milestones. As you get closer to the deadline, the risk increases. By identifying what is necessary to win and then measuring progress and quality against it, you also ensure that reviews

This MS Word file is part of the training materials that go along with the article titled How to make figuring out what to propose simple. It provides you with a simple checklist that?you can use for the recommended action items. ?

There's the way you should write a proposal, and then there's how to write the one you just got stuck with. What points should you make so that you can make the rest of the proposal about substantiating them. Points based on what you know about what matters the customer What the RFP says matters Your differentiators People like the customer

The attached file is Calhoun International's capabilities brief.

Transparency is the idea that the customer can see the status of all project components and all project data. When you operate transparently, the customer knows about problems as soon as you do, and knows everything you do about them.  When you operate transparently, the customer can tell if you have kept all your promises.  Transparency is about not giving yourself anywhere to hide, and making sure the customer knows it.  Transparency requires that you actually do things the way you prom