Down Economy. Fewer Deals. Respond To An RFP!

When I worked coaching sales teams I generally took a tough, if not black and white, position on responding to blind RFPs.  My clients heard me say again and again, “Follow conventional wisdom:  If you didn’t write it, your competitor probably did.  Let’s come up with more productive ways to spend your time.”
(Now I’m on [...]

Collaborative Proposals

If you are not selling in a tightly-controlled, RFP-driven sales environment, you might want to consider this collaborative approach for getting your proposals approved.  Proposal collaboration really makes sense now, during these unsure economic times.  It provides the customer with the ability to directly control the content of your proposal as well as the price.
First, some background. 
I’ve [...]

Boeing: Outsold Twice on the Same Deal?

I heard on the news this evening that Boeing may decide to no-bid on the $35 billion U.S. Airforce tanker opportunity.
AviationWeek reported that “Word that Boeing is strongly considering a ‘no bid’ position for the next round of the U.S. Air Force refueling tanker competition is spreading only two days after the Pentagon released the [...]

Sales Training RFPs

I want to share with you some more of my recent experience and related opinions regarding sales training vendors and RFPs.*  (See my May 23rd post about RFPs.  If you haven’t read it and are interested in how sales training vendors—arguably world-class experts in managing RFP response strategies—reacted to one RFP, you should.) 
Before I go into where [...]

Beware of White Paper Propaganda

White papers serve a function: to position a vendor’s assessment of opportunities or challenges faced by their target market and serve up that vendor’s products or services as solutions.  In most cases, white papers are marketing documents rather than the unbiased analyses they appear to be.  (There are exceptions, including the white paper recently published [...]

Sales Training Vendors and RFPs

Among other things, we work with companies in facilitating an understanding of their own sales performance improvement requirements as well as guiding them through the sales training vendor selection process where appropriate.  
One client of ours issued RFPs to a long list of six sales training vendors.  The RFP included significant sales process work, sales training [...]