One of our national corporate clients has asked us to help its sales professionals strengthen their proposal writing skills. Can you recommend a resource -- either a company that supplies such training or an individual teacher/trainer – that excels in teaching this subject to a professional sales force? Some details follow:

Targeted areas of need – These Account Executives are generally excellent oral communicators, but weak writers. They need help with:

· Organizing thoughts around the customer’s need

· Communicating a compelling and persuasive story that matches that need with a customized solution

· “Packaging” the solution they recommend in a clear, reader-friendly presentation that demonstrates good organization, grammar usage, spelling, etc.

Meeting format – Our client-company will repeat this training in five different regional sales meetings across the U.S., early this summer.

· Based on our past experience with this client, locations will probably include one city in each of the following states: California, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and New York.

· Minimally, each session should take a half-day, but may expand to a full day if meeting planners think it’s necessary.

· Our client has budgeted up to $3,000 for each half-day of instruction, and $5,000 for each full-day session.


We desire a high caliber instructor who has a proven history of teaching proposal-writing skills that include thought organization as well as following basic English-usage, grammar and spelling guidelines. This person will be asked to submit a video that captures a sample of his/her instruction in this subject matter, ideally to this kind of audience.


Thanks for your recommendations.

I recommend Better Communications. Their website is:

http://www.writetothetop.com/

Their programs are top quality. I sent one of my team members through their course. They have public courses and will do custom work.

The sales rep I worked with is Navi (pronounced "navy") and she can be reached at 800-598-6035 for info and quotes.

I have used Exec Comm pretty extensively in my career with great results. http://execcomm.com/

In my experience, while there are a lot of good technical writing people and firms out there, really good proposal writing tends to be industry specific. For instance, what it takes to produce a good proposal for say...USAID...is not the same kind of proposal you'd want for say...Dept. of Interior (even though they're both US Federal Agencies). I suggest that rather than look for someone regarded as a good writing or proposal firm, you find one that is specific to the industry of your client.

Additionally, the common respond when a firm has a low proposal success rate is "send people to training to improve their skills." I suggest you try to identify some data first before making the decision that training is the answer:
--what is the proposal success rate for the firm?
--does it vary from writer to writer (or sales rep to sales rep)?
--why do most of the proposals not get accepted? Until you have a better idea of this, you won't know what will improve the proposal acceptance rate. I know this may be hard information to get (depending upon the client base and industry focus) but it's a vital piece of info. You may discover that the biggest factors have little or nothing to do with the writing skill of the sales reps.

If you still have a need for this training I could offer you some suggestions. I have been in the training business for 28 years and have developed and presented many courses such as this.

I have worked for many of the major training corporations and can tell you from first hand experience that if you hire one of them you will most certainly get a training that comes "canned" and not customized just for you or for your company. Also, these companies are beginning to use newer and less experienced trainers.

I would certainly recommend working directly with an independent contractor who specializes in customizing and presenting those customized courses.

One company I would recommend is PowerNow Training.

Sheri Tingle

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