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Writing Dangerously

Once we have an opportunity we need to decide whether it is a viable one for us to actively pursue. Having meetings with clients, preparing a written proposal, travelling to a presentation and all the other costs of gaining business are just one aspect. It may be that the opportunity isn't quite right for you - it may not be your core competence or could be a distraction from a more important project or prospect. Maybe you know that your competition is in prime position for this piece of work and you feel that this project "has their name" all over it (we'll look at that problem in a later article) and that it simply isn't worth you writing a proposal.

So how do you decide whether to bid or not? The danger is that you make an emotional decision to bid and Write a proposal, even though it may not be the right opportunity for the business, after all you have put in the effort to find or create the lead. You should go through this process even if a client organisation has given you a "hot" lead and asked you to respond to their RFP or tender document.

You need to qualify your lead all the way through the sales process - from the initial prospecting to just before the submission of the proposal. At Learn to Write Proposals we have our Bid Qualification Toolkit to help you make those decisions and it helps you in two ways.

Firstly, the Bid Qualification Engine helps you measure the probability of your success in a particular opportunity, but this isn't a one-time thing that might stop your business development in its tracks...every time you qualify the opportunity you are identifying strengths and weaknesses in your capture planning strategy (our next article will look at capture planning in more detail and how you can develop a strategy to help you win work). Identifying weaknesses in you position (and the potential impact of those weaknesses) early on in the business development process helps you overcome them and make your proposal and position stronger.

Secondly, the Bid/No-Bid matrix helps you make an objective decision about the viability of an opportunity.

Any sort of formal qualifying process is important and should be done regularly throughout the development process. Why? Because it will help inform you about your progress and also will help you if your bid is unsuccessful and an analysis and report has to be made of what went wrong. If you can show that you followed a structured process of identifying potential problems and mitigating them, it helps feed into improving how you go about Writing Business Proposals and winning work.

This is the second in a short series of articles from http://www.learntowriteproposals.com examining How To Write A Proposal.

About the Author:

Learn to Write Proposals is the leading Internet business proposal resource center.
At Learn to Write Proposals you will find all the tools that any proposal writer needs to manage, write and review a proposal. This includes training material, templates, tools and resources all designed with one goal in mind - to help our members create better proposals, faster.
http://www.learntowriteproposals.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - How to Write a Proposal - Qualifying Your Leads and Bid/no-bid Decisions for Your Business Proposal

Night of Writing Dangerously — Chris Baty

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Create Dangerously (Hardcover) $38.31 "Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I`ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part, that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."--Create Dangerously In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus` lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family`s homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe.Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat`s belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.

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