Life is full of binary questions.  Paper or plastic?  Yankees or Red Sox?  Boxers or briefs?  Baked or mashed?  You get the idea.


A couple of days ago a colleague sent me an e-mail in which she asked one of those binary questions:   Are you aware of any research or information regarding the value of having a centralized proposal center vs. having field sales people manage and respond to proposals on their own?

She was working with a major client, a global corporation, which currently lets the field sales personnel manage all RFP responses.   But now they’re thinking that might not be the best way to do it.  They wanted some feedback.

Hoping to save myself some time, I turned to my own book to see what I’d already said about the issue of centralized vs. decentralized proposal operations.  It’s such a fundamental issue, I figured I had a few paragraphs in there that I could cut and paste into a reply and look really helpful without doing much work.  In Persuasive Business Proposals, I discuss the steps you need to follow to get a complex proposal written as quickly and efficiently as possible.  I describe what it takes to create a “proposal center of excellence”—the people, processes, tools, and so forth that make for a great operation.  But to my embarrassment I found that I don’t discuss whether it makes sense to centralize the proposal operation.  So let me make amends here.

 
A centralized proposal operation doesn’t have to be geographically positioned in one office.  Physically the contributors can be spread all over the place.  But it must be a dedicated operation with a primary focus of responding to RFPs, creating proactive proposals, and developing oral proposals.  The alternative is to leave all of that work in the hands of the sales person or account team in the field.

 
So which approach is better?  Well, not to sound like a fence-straddling politician, they both have some positives.

 
The advantages of having a centralized proposal operation include:

   1. Best practices.  Theoretically, a sales organization should be able to implement and enforce best practices, but it’s much more difficult than you might expect.  Just look at the history of CRM systems that have crashed and burned because sales people in the field wouldn’t use them.  A dedicated proposal organization is more likely to adopt and enforce best practices for the enterprise.
   2. Consistent approach.  A centralized proposal group is likely to establish and follow consistent practices, implement efficient content management and proposal automation tools, and employ people with specific talents for the job.  A survey done some years ago by the APMP found that companies that follow a consistent methodology for writing proposals have higher win ratios than companies that don’t have consistent processes, regardless of which particularly methodology they follow.
   3. Better content management.  One of the biggest challenges in a large organization is finding and using the right content for a given proposal.  Likewise, creating new content when necessary and storing that new content afterward so that it’s available to the entire organization are also big challenges.
   4. Enhanced qualification.  A proposal group won’t have the power to say which deals a company goes after, nor should it, but it is likely to have a consistent and objective method of qualifying deals.  The result is a secondary screening that will help weed out deals that shouldn’t be pursued, have very little chance of winning, are not profitable, or that reflect wishful thinking rather than good sales work.
   5. Greater efficiency.  A centralized operation by its nature will drive wasted time and effort out of sales, since most sales people are not very good and not very quick at putting proposals together.  I’ve never met a VP of sales who thought it was a good idea to have sales reps sitting in front of a laptop trying to write a great executive summary.
   6. Consolidated reporting.  A centralized organization will have a much easier time tracking win/loss ratios and other key metrics, including proposal costs.
   7. Economies of utilization.  Most proposal writers do a better job at document creation at a much lower price point than sales people can do, and proposal writers can typically produce many more proposals than a sales person because the sales person is doing that work in his or her “spare” time.
   8. Consistent tone.  When the sales organization writes the proposals, they’re typically all over the map—different formats, different tone, and frequently an incorrect use of company logos, branding guidelines, and so forth.  A proposal group gets all that stuff sorted out and documented right at the outset.
   9. Fewer substantive mistakes.  Proposal specialists are less likely to make mistakes in the proposals they produce—mistakes like the wrong pricing, offering products or services that are no longer available, including the wrong terms and conditions, and so forth.
  10. Fewer credibility killers.  It stands to reason that if you have professional writers creating a document, you will get greater professionalism in the documents.  That means fewer misspellings, typos, grammar mistakes, incorrect client names, and other embarrassing errors.

What about having the sales force do the proposals?  Well, there are a few advantages to that approach, too:

   1. Personalization.  Sales people are closer to the deal and can personalize the message better, making it more persuasive.
   2. Commitment.  Sales people care more, since they have commissions riding on producing a quality document.
   3. Creative.  A proposal written by the sales team is less likely to look corporate, stale, or boring.
   4. Familiar.  The writing style is more likely to sound like the salesperson who the customer already knows and trusts, rather than a generic corporate tone.  This will help maintain trust, because the client feels like they’re working with somebody familiar.
   5. Cheap.  One of the unspoken but huge advantages of laying the task on the sales team is the fact that a company can “bury” the true costs of proposal writing by forcing sales people to do them in the evenings and on weekends.

When you add it up, it seems pretty clear that centralization makes a lot more sense for a large organization.  And if you’re doing highly complex proposals or writing bids for government work, I don’t think you have any option.  In small companies, there may not be enough leeway in budgets to fund a centralized operation, but for any company that has more than half a dozen sales people it’s worth considering whether it makes sense to hire a proposal writer.

 
What do you think?  Have you worked in an organization that had the sales team write the proposals?  How did it work?  Or have you been part of a centralized proposal operation?  Did your company get most of the benefits I listed above?  Send me a note ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and I’ll share your feedback next time.

 
Dr. Tom Sant is the author of the bestselling Persuasive Business Proposals and The Giants of Sales, both published by AMACOM.  His new book, The Language of Success, focuses on how to write clearly, concisely, and effectively in any business situation.  Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit our Web site at www.hydeparkpartnerscal.com .
 

You are fractured. Your attention span is finite. Your time is limited so you are forced to pick and choose what you focus on. You are pulled in several directions at once. You switch focus from home to work to kids to friends to acquaintances. One second you are concentrating on driving, the next you are looking for your ringing cell phone, and a minute later you are listening attentively to the breaking news on your radio. At work you are typing a report, then answering the phone, surfing the Internet, solving another problem, looking for your pen, chatting with a coworker, attending meetings, and thinking about how tired you are. Everywhere you go, you are presented with an increasing amount of stimuli—friends, family, coworkers, sales people, telemarketers, television advertisements, and shows, news, movies, magazines, billboards, radio spots, and web sites all competing to get your attention. It is amazing that we accomplish anything at all!

There are lots of ways to write a really great, but losing, proposal. Some companies are better at it than others, but I’d bet that all have found ways to lose that “sure thing” at least once in their history. If you are familiar with the nine fundamental tenets of good proposals (see the box on the next page), you will recognize the five proposal “tactics” here as sure-fire ways to invite trouble. No matter how experienced you may be, it never hurts to ask yourself whether your proposal teams are at least a little guilty of these five popular ways to write a losing proposal.

1.    Underestimate the difficulty of proposal preparation and assign the wrong people to the team.

“Writing a proposal is easy — anyone can to it. Who is better qualified to describe our proposed program than our engineers and specialists who developed it? They write technical reports all the time. Proposals are no different.”

WRONG!

Writing a losing proposal is easy; writing a winning proposal is tough! Program developers will describe what they want to tell about their program, not what the proposal evaluators want to know. They will write ten pages if they know ten pages, but only one page if that’s all they know, even though the evaluators need ten pages to be sure that your company knows what it is doing. Proposal organization, format, presentation, wording, and first impressions are all important and comprise a unique discipline in which most technical and management people are not trained. Technical people don’t speak “proposalese.” You need people who know how to plan, organize, and write.