Three things can happen...

Over at Knowledge Work, I've posted about how to qualify proposal leads, and led off with the inevitable sports analogy:

Legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who knew a thing or two about strategy, once explained why he typically ran an offense that relied heavily on the running game, shunning the forward pass:

“Three things can happen when you throw a football, and two of them are bad.”

Qualifying RFP-based leads (Knowledge Work)

Let's review the bidding

The following paragraphs emphatically do not describe my current employer, chosen by me in large part because they grok the importance of well-designed, well-written proposals and are willing to invest in their management and production.

It does describe a few places I've had personal experience with, however:

Bid managers are unsung heroes in many companies according to Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas of the University of Lincoln [UK]: “The fortunes of many construction, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, IT, distribution and services companies are heavily dependent upon their success at competitive bidding. Yet too often teams putting proposals together are left to their own devices and provided with inadequate support. Some directors and senior managers largely ignore the very people whose efforts make the greatest contribution to their salaries.”

Speaking at the Annual Conference of the UK Association of Proposal Management Professionals Coulson-Thomas outlined key findings from his continuing investigation of winning business and competitive bidding: “The senior management of companies with low win rates tends to view proposal professionals as ‘boring techies or grafting geeks who work out prices’. They are also often risk averse and worry about the ‘cost of bidding’. They put bid teams through a battery of internal checks and confrontational reviews that add little value to submitted proposals, but greatly complicate their preparation.”

Company bosses failing to support bid managers and proposal managers