Laura’s Winning Ideas

Carl Dickson has been involved with proposals since 1989 and is widely considered a proposal guru. He specializes in training materials and proposal technology tools. His website, www.captureplanning.com has over 900 articles, instruction manuals, and training tools for proposal professionals.

He and I spent time on the phone this week, chatting about winning work.

Q: What are the must-use technologies and the cutting-edge technologies for proposals?

Carl Dickson: The web-based tools are extremely useful because of the ways you can link related information and be sure to use tidbits that otherwise get left behind on a shelf in someone’s office.

With these tools, you can drill down to find nuggets and connections that would be impossible in hardcopy. For teams in different locations, this is critical to win.

I love technology, but I must point out that much can be done with manual systems and process.

It is better to understand the functional aspects of the proposal process. At that point, the tools become secondary.

As for bleeding edge, AJAX is pretty cool. It’s a way of making pages more interactive. Google uses AJAX in their email and maps. Keep an eye out for tools using AJAX to improve performance.

Many small companies are doing interesting things. Many of these new tools can be used in place of Microsoft Office software applications. It gets more interesting once you start linking these individual tools together. People are just starting to figure out what can be done by connecting these Web 2.0 tools and we’ll see some interesting things happening we can use for proposals.

Q: Synchris is a sponsor of your website. Do you use Privia, their proposal software? What aspects of proposal management software are important for proposal managers to look for?

Carl Dickson: Privia is very much an enterprise product. It would be overkill to use Privia for a single proposal or small numbers of proposals. But if I were starting or re-engineering a company, I would give serious thought to building the process around the Privia platform.

Privia works best in settings where you have multiple teams, and where multiple proposals are being produced at the same time. The benefits of automation add up over a series of proposals. You have to invest in buying, deploying and getting everyone to use it. Once you accomplish that, it leaves you to focus instead on making the content of your proposals great, instead of managing bits of information.

For a small team, it is easier to get everyone focused. However, you need big tools to keep large teams focused on the same goal for an individual proposal.

Q: What does your website offer?

Carl Dickson: We have two areas: individual documents or tutorials, and a memberships area.

Several hundred articles are free, and visitors can purchase some of the longer more detailed documents, for instance, Writing a Management Plan.

Members get those benefits plus daily use and research. Indexes for everything are available for members, and members can create PDFs of specific articles to distribute to their teammates.

We also keep a resource directory for members, with over 300 websites and sources useful for proposal functions.

And our template tool lets you build a document by answering questions, and that’s pretty popular. Membership starts at $149.95. For the higher level membership at $298.00, web-based training is added to a membership.

The web-based training are skill enhancement sessions of a variety of types. The Just-in-Time sessions are exceptionally cost effective compared to attending seminars or hiring a consultant to visit your firm.

Q: Who finds your website most compelling?

Carl Dickson: Our visitors split into thirds: startups (10 people or less), Fortune 100, and mid-sized companies (dozens to several thousand employees). We are not industry specific. 60 Percent are in commercial industries of every type, with 40 percent interested in government contracting.

Thanks Carl!

ACTION NEEDED: 1) Bookmark this website and 2) make a date on your calendar to visit and browse through the materials.

These articles work wonders when you are trying to convince someone to cooperate in improving their proposal.