Posted by Jon
Time for a look at some the latest “Pet Peeves” in the 2007 Proposals & BD Professionals survey. I groaned with familiarity at more than a few:
Time for a look at some the latest “Pet Peeves” in the 2007 Proposals & BD Professionals survey. I groaned with familiarity at more than a few:
- What is it about “send me the RFP as soon as you receive it” that somehow translates into “go ahead and sit on it for a week?”
- Salespeople who don’t show up for proposal meetings but still get the commission!
- “Drive by sales”, as in sales forwarding an email request from customer with RFP/RFI included before reading it, understanding the request, and scoping it first.
- People who think they know how to write (such as sales executives) yet exert their power to edit text they should not be meddling with.
- The response “we’ve already responded to this before”.
- Receiving RFP responses from SME’s that in no way answer the questions assigned to them.
- People who wait until the last minute when they know there’s a deadline.
- Lack of MS Word skills in those who use MS Word daily.
- Sales people who don’t send edits or draft inputs on time, and then expect you to create answers for them at the last minute.
- With so many proposal managers in the US, why are there still so many people… who have no idea what we do, how hard we work to meet deadlines and still view us as admins?
- When someone says “To make a long story short” they have already taken up too much of my time.
- People who think this job is easy.
- Sales Person: We must bid on this proposal. It is important that we appear interested even if we can’t win!!!
- Those who declare that govt proposals are SOOO much more complicated than commercial. They obviously have never been in commercial market!
- RFPs in Excel format!
- RFPs that do not clearly and succinctly explain the submission requirements…AND, RFPs received as hardcopies or scanned PDFs.
- Sales people that don’t realise how long proof-reading & final checking actually takes!
- That our database is not up to date.
- People who sit on your email requests and don’t even acknowledge that they have received it and will get to it when they can!
- Sales people who believe they have a “relationship” with a client after one meeting…
- People that expect you to drop all your other bids and work for them!
- People who don’t answer the question because they haven’t read the brief or have read the brief but think they are so special that they don’t have to follow the instructions
- People that can’t understand the basic rules for use of apostrophes.
- Using ‘&’ instead of ‘and’.
- Florida drivers.
Whilst I’m on the subject of the survey, here are a few replies from the general comments section, which I wanted to reproduce as I couldn’t agree more with their praise for Barbara Esmedina, who’s running the exercise:
- Thank you for doing this.
- Excellent idea. Kudos to all involved
- An absolutely wonderful survey. Thank you for all of your hard work and effort. You are appreciated!
- I am VERY appreciative of this as it make me feel connected to something larger … and given the lack of appreciation of this job, it is great to know there are other masochists out there too!