Training paths to proposal excellence

I've been really delighted over the past couple of weeks by the feedback we've received on our new training prospectus. Too often, proposal skills are overlooked by sales management, and too often training in this area's thought of as "something that only bid managers need to worry about".

Our document breaks new ground by outlining clear and comprehensive training paths not only for bid / proposal specialists, but also for salespeople, content contributors and senior managers involved in business development. It presents a challenge to those responsible for work winning: are you truly continuing to develop your colleagues' bidding skills to the necessary extent?

The 48-page syllabus of course contains many proven 'old favourites' - such as our award-winning Masterclass and our APMP certification coaching. There are some courses we've revamped in the past year to cover the very latest best practice - such as our 'Presenting to Win' sessions that have been changing even experienced salespeople's views of contemporary pitching.

And there are a few where we've taken our years of experience of helping clients to win business and turned those into new classroom events. I'm particularly looking forward to rolling out our 'Proposal Editing Bootcamp', sessions on 'Capturing the Deal' and 'Renewal Proposals', and our intensive senior executive 'Proposal Excellence in a Day' benchmarking workshop.

Throughout, we've stuck to our principle of only delivering training in-house, rather than running public courses (other than for the APMP qualifications). Our philosophy is clear: to be truly effective in changing skills and behaviour, training has to be tailored to the needs of the specific organisation and audience.

We hope the document (downloadable here) will stimulate readers' thinking on the criticality of establishing a clear programme for bid and proposal skills development in their organisations - whether or not they then turn to Strategic Proposals to deliver the training. Although that would, of course, also be nice! I'd love to hear your feedback on it.