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Subject:Proposals -Reply From:Carol Van Natta <CVANNATT -at- ITC -dot- NRCS -dot- USDA -dot- GOV> Date:Thu, 8 Jan 1998 12:46:31 -0700
Gina, I have to add my voice to the chorus of John, Jill, et al.,
suggesting you're headed for trouble. At a previous job, our
corporate proposal dept. constantly had to fight with
tight-fisted upper management and lazy engineers on the
subject of boilerplate text -- they wanted to send it out the
door as is, and we wanted it to be heavily edited with the
particular client in mind. Our dept. put together some
numbers that showed a fairly direct correlation between time
spent on the proposal (i.e., customizing the boilerplate) and
the win rate, which helped make our point.
Despite this, however, upper management had an outside
party develop a database of resumes, project experience,
and boilerplate text. The database was distributed to the
branch offices but never used, because upper management
never budgeted for maintaining and updating the database,
so the data became worthless within 6 months.
>>> Gina Hertel <Ghertel -at- ALPHA88 -dot- COM> 1/8/98 7:57
am >>>
Senior Management has told me that they want proposal
production to be a
"push button" process.
I have made proposal templates for each of our service
offerings, and I
am in the process of writing a VBA program which will allow
the user of
the template to fill in company specific info (e.g., the
prospective
client's name) in one shot. Then, once any customized info
has been
added, I plan to store these proposals in soft copy for
purposes of
recycling. I also want to buy a binding machine, so the doc
team can
bind these proposals in house.
Is there anything else I can do????
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
Gina Hertel
Technical Writer
Alpha Technologies, Inc.
ghertel -at- alpha88 -dot- com
(732) 980-1800 Ext.749
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