People: Putting the Right Staff in Place

The cornerstone of a successful proposal center is a staff that can focus on delivering strategic, client-centered, winning proposals.

In top-notch proposal operations, everyone's roles and responsibilities are clearly defined in detail and everybody is focused by management directive on improving the organization's overall capabilities to bid successfully. To attract quality people, the company creates an environment that is creative and challenging. In addition, the company develops a career path for people who work in the center so they can see a future for themselves.

At the minimum, an effective proposal team will have three key members: the proposal manager, the writer, and the graphics expert. From time to time, you will also need to draw upon subject matter or technical experts.

Proposal Manager. The proposal manager is responsible for bringing the proposal project to an on-time, successful completion. Just as important, the proposal manager develops or facilitates development of the overall proposal strategy and makes sure that the strategy is executed throughout the proposal. The proposal manager will typically make assignments to other contributors, monitor their progress, and either edit their submissions or assign them for editing. In addition, the proposal manager will assure the technical accuracy of the proposal, will gather and monitor cost data, will make sure the costing is reviewed and approved, and will monitor the overall effort to keep the cost of proposal development within budget.

The manager should have in-depth knowledge of the customer and the opportunity, and should share that insight with the rest of the proposal team during a kick-off meeting and throughout the project. Ideally, the proposal manager should be someone who can assimilate knowledge quickly, sort the useful and relevant from the superfluous or irrelevant, stay organized, think strategically, stay focused on deadlines, and maintain a high level of energy and stamina, even during difficult periods when the hours are long. The proposal manager will also need leadership skills, because he or she will be organizing a team and moving a complex project to conclusion.

Other qualifications and experience that will lead to success as a proposal manager include:

• Self-starter

• Savvy about marketing and sales

• Excellent writing skills

• Good communication and negotiation skills

• Solid, applications-oriented knowledge of products and services being offered

• Field/product experience, either in sales, installation, or customer support

Writer. Proposals are communication vehicles. It goes without saying that you'll need people with strong communication skills, especially the ability to write clearly and quickly. In my opinion the best kind of background for proposal writing is journalism. Someone who has made his or her living as a reporter, particularly if that person has a business background, can crank out the text you need in a fast and dependable way.

Besides having good writing skills, this person must be computer literate. Advanced knowledge of word processing techniques will make the writer more productive. (It's extremely frustrating to discover that someone's contribution has lost all formatting because the person didn't use the style sheet.) But computer literacy goes far beyond just word processing or desktop publishing programs. Your writer will need to be able to navigate around the Web, both within the company's private sites and externally, to locate information. He or she will need to be comfortable using e-mail, working on a network, using backup software, and possibly creating materials in a presentation system, such as Microsoft PowerPoint.

Graphics Expert. The graphics expert is the person most likely to be missing from a fully staffed proposal team. Often, proposal units draw on the marketing department for graphic support, or they turn to outside vendors on a contract basis to create graphics. From a budgetary standpoint that might make sense, but ideally you should have someone on the team who thinks visually and who can translate proposal-specific messages into crisp, interesting images.

A good graphics person should also be skilled in page design and layout issues. If you can find a contributor who can create a simple, clean, but distinctive format for your proposals, grab that individual around the knees and hang on. That's one extremely valuable person.

Subject Matter or Technical Experts. In addition to the three core functions found in a proposal team—the manager, the writer, and the graphic designer—you may need special expertise from time to time. Although not likely to be an employee of the proposal center, the subject matter expert is often indispensable. When you really need somebody with a deep knowledge of the technology underlying your recommended solutions, you realize that's the kind of content that just can't be faked. You need an expert. The problem comes from the fact that your technical experts (1) don't think proposal writing is part of their job and (2) don't know how to communicate their in-depth knowledge in language that's appropriate to a customer. Store whatever contributions your technical experts make so that you don't have to go back to them and ask them to do it again. They hate that.