Carl Dickson

Give value to get value. Demonstrate expertise instead of claiming it. I share overshare insights and approaches. I don't claim to be "one of the world's top experts in proposals". I write about proposals and let the reader decide. After I've given value, when it's time to sell I offer. I don't use consumer marketing practices on business customers. I don't advertise to them, I let them know where they can get more of what I've shown. I invite them. Everyone who is a PropLIBRARY Insider chose to accept the invitation so that they could be part of conversations like this.

Welcome to the newly upgraded PropLIBRARY. We are still testing, cleaning up some loose ends, and reformatting a few things, especially in the Online Training area. We've got about a week's worth of work to do, but it's on stuff that hopefully you won't even notice. If you are a guest, you will be able to see what content is here, but you won't be able to open things. If you are a subscriber, you should find the content is much easier to navigate, filter, and search. But most importantly, every article can now be discussed. And we have a separate area for discussions and networking. If you want to help out, then before you leave please post a comment in a forum or on an article. You get extra credit if you're the first to post! Thanks!

For consultants, PropLIBRARY is mostly about: Content marketing to potential customers Ongoing career and personal development, because you can never be expert enough and need to keep up with the times If you are an expert, then you already understand the importance of ongoing development. So let's talk about marketing to potential customers. Someday we might allow advertising, but that's not what we're really about. What we're about is engagement. Being able to network and engage in a sheltered space with people who are all interested in proposals, business development, and capture is much better than advertising if those are your potential customers. We recommend that you: Take a step back from selling Focus on demonstrating your capabilities and expertise instead of claiming it Embrace the idea of an audience collective So let's talk about the audience collective because it's a big deal. You may have an audience. We have our existing audience. Both the combined total of everyone else's audience dwarfs both of us. What if we all contribute to the audience? There is some advantage to you in having some of your audience on the site to engage with. It will help you achieve engagement with people you meet. There is also advantage in associating with quality people. We have set PropLIBRARY up so that when you refer people, it can be tracked. And you get rewarded for referring people. Depending on the number of referrals, this could be a little bonus or a major source of revenue. But revenue isn't the point. The point is to recognize participants who contribute to the audience collective. We will be doing this actively and it's probably worth more than the referral revenue share. Since you may be wondering for each person you refer who subscribes for 3 months, you'll get credit for one month. Refer 12 subscribers and a year of subscribing to PropLIBRARY is free of charge. Refer 1200 subscribers and the Make 1,200 referrals at the Premium level and the cash-out value to you would be $38,400. However, getting recognized on our site and in out newsletter for being a top referrer could be worth even more than that if it brings you new clients. There are also opportunities here: To demonstrate your experience through discussions on PropLIBRARY Publish articles and get in front of the audience Publish ebooks, presentations, or other files and charge what you will for them Create online courses and sell them to the audience The advantage of putting your online training here is the audience. You have just as many opportunities to get in front of the audience here as we do. If our approach to building an audience collective is successful, then consultants like you could earn more on PropLIBRARY than we do from hosting it. And because an audience collective creates an audience far larger than our own, if that happens we will be quite happy with the outcome. This post is plenty long enough. Feel free to ask questions, drill down to specifics, or move the discussion in the direction you want it to go.

PropLIBRARY is about two things: Improving your win rate Networking and engaging with other professionals who have similar interests The majority of our customers are companies that do business with the government (B2G) and companies that do business with other companies (B2B). In both cases, it's mostly companies that win business through competitive proposals or who are interested in best practices for maximizing their business capture rate. Some of our customers are consultants, service providers, or product companies. They also have an interest in improving win rates, whether it's their own or their customers' win rate. On PropLIBRARY, you can network in both groups, find resources, and learn from many different perspectives. We cater to both, focusing on topics like career development and process implementation for people who work at companies and on building an audience collective with consultants. We very carefully manage the value in being able to discover resources and the desire to be able to discuss how to do things without being sold to. There is a place for both and that's how we've organized things. Feel free to ask a follow up, or even a completely different question that this may have inspired.

Cross-reference matrix creation sounds complicated in text. View this slide show to see how it works.

Creating a compliance matrix sounds complicated in text. View this slide show to see how it works.