Re: Other proposals

Subject: Re: Other proposals
From: Alan -dot- Miller -at- prometric -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 15:10:23 -0500


Herm:

My experience writing proposals has been in an area you seem to have
overlooked (by accident or design?), i.e., business-to-business proposals
... both solicited and unsolicited. In my previous incarnation over 90% of
our proposals were of this type. We avoided all government (local, state,
federal, foreign ... especially foreign!) RFPs/RFQs unless work was really
short. And the kids were starving.

Most of the proposals I have written have been to address a specific
request from the client business. For these guys the proposal process
starts long before anything gets written. One must get on the business'
list of approved or qualified bidders or vendors. Every business has a
different procedure for this, from simple to Byzantine. Even if one is on
the list, it may not be enough to be invited to bid on a job. For example,
I received word that a utility in the Northeast was issuing an RFP for
developing system descriptions and operating procedures for one of their
coal-fired power plants. I checked with my contact in their training
department, and yes, we were on their approved bidder list. When the RFP
was issued, we didn't receive it. I checked again. Yes, we were on the
bidder's list, for Nuclear training services not for fossil procedure
development. By the time I finally got that fixed and received the RFP, we
were two weeks behind our competition in preparing the proposal. We made it
to Best and Final, but lost out to a low-ball bid from a competitor who
already had a team on-site (for another job) and were very hungry for work.

Looking forward to these discussions. Though I don't write proposals for my
current situation, one never knows what might happen. I think
proposal-writing is an important part of every writer's (technical or
non-technical, fiction or non-fiction) toolkit.

Al Miller
Chief Documentation Curmudgeon
Prometric(r), Inc.


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