Proposals: your shop window

I’m fresh from an interesting debate with a company which has a heavy high-street presence selling to consumers. Their shops are wonderful: state-of-the-art retail design, trendy, eye-catching, impressive. They’re now doing more and more work in the business-to-business space.

In the B2B market, their proposals are their shop window. Yet the documents are thrown together by one long-suffering member of the sales support team (“and we really struggle when he goes on vacation….”).

In a same vein, I often like to pick up copies of the latest marketing leaflet in the reception area of the companies I visit. Glossy, professional photography, copy-written to the highest standards – yet I doubt a brochure ever won a single piece of business. Meanwhile written proposals, which do have a huge impact on customers’ contract awards, suffer from continuing under-investment and neglect.

And while I’m talking about B2B proposals, I’m reminded of my theory that proposals are never really “B2B” documents. They’re “P2P” – about the people in the bidder’s team writing documents for the people sitting around the buyer’s evaluation table!

This article was written by Jon and filed under Musings, Processes & best practice. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via RSS or Email.

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