Spring Forward: Recognizing Your Own Career Growth and Owning Your Value
As the days are growing longer and the signs of spring are emerging, we naturally think of growth. The first daffodils poking up through the soil or the trees beginning to bud, but how often do we pause and recognize our own growth? In our world of proposals and business development, our jobs require us to spend significant time highlighting the strengths of organizations and teams and selling our company’s products and solutions. We, or at least I, tend to undersell ourselves, assuming because we’ve mastered a skill, it’s not special or worthy of note anymore. Sometimes we might even miss the fact we gained the skill at all, because progress and growth happens gradually over time. Have You Grown Without Noticing? I challenge you to think back to where you were in your career a year ago. What tasks once felt challenging but now are second nature? What feedback
Christmas in July – You Should’ve Been There!
We had a great time at our July in-person meeting with Santa! Check out our video and photo gallery below for a recap:
Three Keys to Prepare for IDIQ Proposals
Republished from our corporate Partner BZ Opportunity Management. Visit their site at https://www.bzopportunity.com/ Multiple award Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts provide large and small companies with a critical tool for long-term corporate success. The limited field and pre-approval provide holders a great opportunity to quickly expand their experience. However, many small firms are justifiably concerned about the heavy lift required to put together a compliant, winning proposal. There are three key pieces of advice
Why Recent Graduates are the Perfect Proposal Writers
Companies hiring proposal writers and coordinators should be scouring LinkedIn for recent graduates and jumping for joy when they apply. Why? Because college prepares all students, regardless of their major, to be good proposal writers. But in spite of this preparation, so many college graduates feel they’re not qualified for even entry-level jobs thanks to those six little words on the entry-level job ad: “three to five years of experience.” Hiring managers should consider counting
Five Tips for Collaborating Across Team Boundaries
This article is reprinted here with permission in collaboration with our corporate partner Xait. Visit Xait's blog at https://www.xait.com/resources/blog Five Tips for Collaborating Across Team Boundaries Sales. Products. Services. Proposals. Team boundaries differentiate one workgroup from another, defining our common tasks and focusing on our shared objectives. When it comes to developing proposals, however, we are better when we work together. For proposal teams, who work across these boundaries every day, the key is collaboration.
Go/No-Go Decisions 101
This article was originally published May 4, 2022 on Team Patri's blog - https://gopatri.com/pro-insights/2022/5/03/go-no-go-decisions-101. Go/No-Go Decisions 101 Professional poker players say the most crucial factor to their success is knowing when to play a hand and when to fold it. Poker players look at the available information, calculate the odds of success, and use this data to make quick decisions to play or pass. Similarly, the best proposal managers would tell you that the most
I Didn’t Go to APMP’s BidCon, but I wish I had
APMP had its flagship celebration this past week in Dallas, TX, and although I had an opportunity to be one of almost 1,000 attendees, at the last minute I decided not to take it. I was already traveling a lot in May and spending too much time away from my family, so I ultimately decided to sit this one out. After missing events for 2-3 years due to COVID, I thought what’s another year? There’s
Learning from Losing
No one wants to lose, and no one wants to talk about losing. It is like talking about death. But failure can be an effective teacher. Most proposals are losing proposals—a statistical fact that is often ignored. But this does not mean that the participants are losers. Consider the career of Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K), a basketball legend who inspires his players to greatness. Under his direction, the Duke University basketball program has become one
Have You Done a Thorough Competitive Assessment to Win the Deal?
Originally published in Solutioneering's Points of View. Know Thyself Socrates, the classical Greek philosopher, said, “Know thyself.” Consider this related quote: “The successful company is the one that finds out what is the matter with its business before its competitors do.” This bit of wisdom comes from a principled and successful entrepreneur who co-founded a company operating in the federal government contracting (GovCon) space until it was acquired—at an impressive price of $236.95 per share! Other companies look at, study, and
A Guide to Agile Proposal Development and Management
Agile software development is a set of approaches to software development where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Agile encourages flexibility and rapid response to change while advocating adaptive planning, iterative development, early delivery, and continual improvement. Agile principles can be applied to other disciplines, including proposal management, to support flexible, adaptive processes that reduce waste, time, and cost. This article explores how Agile can be applied to proposal management
Proposal Coordinator Commandments
Originally published on APMP's blog, Winning the Business https://winningthebusiness.com/proposal-coordinator-commandments/ Proposal coordinators are often overlooked, but the value they can bring to a team is instrumental in enabling the proposal manager to manage the bid process most efficiently from start to finish. Sure, a coordinator’s role is to assist the proposal manager, but what does that really mean? What differentiates a good coordinator from a great one? There are five “commandments” that every coordinator should follow
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“Thinking Outside of the Box”- The Art & Science of GovCon Marketing
Originally published on LinkedIn, republished here with the author's permission: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thinking-outside-box-art-science-govcon-marketing-mark-amtower/ What is “outside of the box thinking”? I have been in too many meetings where an executive will say something like “Our marketing is stale. We need some outside-the-box thinking.” Often this is the result of seeing or reading about success B2B or B2C marketing in a book or business magazine, or in one instance I can think of, a CEO sitting next to
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