Marketing and Business Development
Before you can win proposals, you must position your business with the right marketing efforts. A business development program includes marketing assessments to identify your target markets, relationship marketing, lead generation and qualification, sales, customer and competitive intelligence gathering, and ultimately proposal writing. If you don't position yourself with the right business development and marketing efforts, your chances of winning the proposal are greatly diminished. Here are some marketing and business development tips.
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Measuring Business Development The RFP is weeks or months away. Are you where you should be in your preparations? How do you know? Can you measure your progress? How Capture the Win If you change your persective, you might see a big difference in your ability to gather the right information you need to win a business opportunity. What You Need to Know About an Opportunity to Win the Bid Most people start their bids unprepared. Find out what you should know about an opportunity in order to have a chance at winning it. Winning When You Don't Know the Customer The best way to win proposals is to know the customer. All the best practices say so. So what should you do when you don't know the customer? 24 Ways to Influence an RFP Without customers to purchase their products or services, every business in the world would be forced to close its doors. Here are a few suggestions for attracting and keeping customers. Attracting and Keeping Customers Without customers to purchase their products or services, every business in the world would be forced to close its doors. Here are a few suggestions for attracting and keeping customers. Have you lost sight of what business you're in? The most important question to ask yourself before you implement a marketing plan is, "What business am I in?" It's simple enough to say that you are in the computer, document management, manufacturing support or other vertical market. But such oversimplified thinking can lead to a reseller's demise. How To Follow Up A Consulting Proposal Following up can be as important as submitting the proposal in closing a deal Identifying New Contract Opportunities Stimulation for creative thinking about identifying agency contract opportunities. Lead sources for project managers If you are going to participate in business development, you have to find potential business opportunities. Finding “leads” is often a stumbling point for people. Here are some ways that project managers can get started. Outline of Technical / Marketing Role in Customer Meetings What are your goals for meeting with the customer? Things won't go according to plan if you don't have one. 5 Key Marketing Questions When you know the answers to these 5 key marketing questions, you can create effective web pages, sales letters and other sales generating communications. The SKINNY on Radio Advertising Tips for buying radio ads. Building a Solid Foundation for Marketing Success While the actual methods may vary, there are certain fundamental things that simply must be in place before any marketing attempts will be successful. So before you begin spending hundreds or thousands of dollars, take a moment to be sure your marketing foundation is solid. Why Everyone is in Business Development Most people don't know it. And worse, even if they do, they don't know how to play their role in business development. If your business is to fulfill its potential, you need everyone to understand how their role fits into the business development function, and how they can support it. Discover the Power of Disruptive Marketing Instead of refining your value proposition, or positioning yourself against the competition, consider being disruptive. Disruptive marketing seeks to overturn the existing dominant approaches by making them obsolete or irrelevant. Instead of looking for a sample or a template to follow, surprise your customers by totally exceeding their expectations. Has the Definition of Marketing Changed? Cyberspace has opened up a whole arena of new marketing technologies, techniques, and twists. Amidst the online exuberance, it seems each online marketer or salesperson changes the definition of marketing to suit his or her preference. Getting Free Publicity - How To Write A Press Release Press releases can be a fabulous tool for business promotion ... IF they are properly written and presented. What You Must Know When Marketing Your Business Some things to consider when marketing your business.
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Implementing A Totally New Business Development Process Most companies already have a business development process. Improvements are incremental and build on what's there. When you are introducing a business development process to an organization that has never had one or are completely starting over, it's much more difficult. Find out about the challenges that The Chesapeake Center had to overcome when implementing theirs. Managing Business Development by Creating a Pipeline A business development pipeline is a key part of providing oversight for the business development function. Find out how to create a pipeline for your opportunities and use it to manage the growth of your business. How The Right Business Development Reports Can Impact Your Win Rate Most professional services businesses use pipelines to manage their opportunity pursuits. However, most companies fail to get the most out of them because they use the wrong report formats. The right reports, presented using the right visuals, will make the health of your business development activities apparent. Get some tips on how to format your reports to answer the key questions you need answered. Discover the secret connection between boring BD reports and your win rate. Case Study: Implementing a Business Development Pipeline Read the story of a company that went from not having any formal process or lead tracking system to implementing a business development pipeline. Find out how we set targets, what assumptions we had to make, what we did to correct our assumptions, and how we managed the pursuits. Case Study: Filling Your Business Development Pipeline Lead tracking systems don't do you any good if you don't have any leads to track. Find out how where one company found the leads to fill their pipeline and how they hit their targets. How To Correct Common Marketing Mistakes A well-tuned marketing campaign is a beautiful thing. Your advertising not only connects with just the right prospects, but it seems everyone is talking about you, your product, or service. How To Create A Brochure Like a Pro One of the most effective and long-standing methods of advertising is the use of a brochure. This miniature corporate profile is an excellent way to convey a good deal of information and bring in sales... IF done properly. PR e-mail...overused, abused and invaluable E-mail is a vital, but limited tool. Find out how to get the most out of it. Competitive Analysis Considerations Preferably before the RFP ever comes out, you should be assessing the potential competition on a proposal. Because a proposal is a competition, you need to score higher to win. In order to boost yourself, or even lower them, you have to know who they are. Relationship Networking Effective relationship networking is all about building relationships and maintaining long lasting connections with other professionals. Do You Sell a Necessity or a Luxury? They are marketed differently. Successful Upselling How to super-size every sale to double, triple, and quadruple your profits instantly. What is a Capture Manager? Some organizations use dedicated capture managers to win their bids. Since capture planning is the topic of our site, we thought we should post an article describing the role of a capture manager. What Is Your Marketing Telling You? Five things that go wrong with ads and how to fix them When Hunting for Contracts, Never use a Shotgun I will never forget a previous boss who had me go through the CBD every day to find proposal targets. This Vice President did not know how true is the maxim, "If you first see the program in the CBD, it is already lost." Who to talk to How do you find someone to talk business with at a company? Why Your Company Should Consider a Blanket Purchase Agreement Changes to the rules for using BPA's have resulted in many agencies using them instead of issuing RFPs. They offer so many advantages to both the Government and to contractors that they have become overused. Find out why they are so attractive...
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Our process guides business developers to define and collect the information needed to win so that the proposal team gets it in the format they need. It even validates that it makes it into the document. Click here to get your copy
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Business Development for Project Managers and Engineers
Provides an approach to business development that technical staff can easily follow.
If you have project managers who have been given responsibility for growth or sales but don't have the right background to feel comfortable with it, the problem solving approaches in this document can help.
