How Bredemarket Helps in Early Proposal Engagement

Man, I’ve been negative lately.

I figure that it is time to become more positive.

I’m going to describe one example of how Bredemarket has helped its customers, based upon one of my client projects from several years ago.

I’ve told this story before, but I wanted to take a fresh look at the problem the firm had, and the solution Bredemarket provided. I’m not identifying the firm, but perhaps YOUR firm has a similar problem that I can solve for you. And your firm is the one that matters.

The problem

This happened several years ago, but was one of Bredemarket’s first successes.

I should preface this by noting that there are a lot of different biometric modalities, including some that aren’t even listed in the image above.

The firm that asked for my help is one that focuses on one particular biometric modality, and provides a high-end solution for biometric identification.

In addition, the firm’s solution has multiple applications, crime solving and disaster victim identification being two of them.

The firm needed a way to perform initial prospect outreach via budgetary quotations, targeted to the application that mattered to the prospect. A simple proposal problem to be solved…or so it seemed.

Why the obvious proposal solution didn’t work

I had encountered similar problems while employed at Printrak and MorphoTrak and while consulting here at Bredemarket, so the solution was painfully obvious.

Have your proposal writers create relevant material in their proposal automation software that could target each of the audiences.

So when your salesperson wants to approach a medical examiner involved in disaster victim identification, the proposal writer could just run the proposal automation software, create the targeted budgetary quotation, populate it with the prospect’s contact information, and give the completed quotation to the salesperson.

Unfortuntely for the firm, the painfully obvious solution was truly painful, for two reasons:

• This firm had no proposal automation software. Well, maybe some other division of the firm had such software, but this division didn’t have access to it. So the whole idea of adding proposal text to an existing software solution, and programming the solution to generate the appropriate budgetary quotation, wasn’t going to fly.
• In addition, this firm had no proposal writers. The salespeople were doing this on their own. The only proposal writer they had was the contractor from Bredemarket. And they weren’t going to want to pay for me to generate every budgetary quotation they needed.

In this case, the firm needed a way for the salespeople to generate the necessary budgetary quotations as easily as possible, WITHOUT relying on proposal automation software or proposal writers.

Bredemarket’s solution

To solve the firm’s problem, I resorted to Stupid Word Tricks.

(Microsoft Word, not Cameo.)

I created two similar budgetary quotation templates: one for crime solving, and one for disaster victim identification. (Actually I created more than two.) That way the salesperson could simply choose the budgetary quotation they wanted.

The letters were similar in format, but had little tweaks depending upon the audience.

The Stupid Word Tricks came into play when I used Word document property features to allow the salesperson to enter the specific information for each prospect, which then rippled throughout the document, providing a customized budgetary quotation to the prospect.

The result

The firms’ salespeople used Bredemarket’s templates to generate initial outreach budgetary quotations to their clients.

And the salespeople were happy.

I’ve used this testimonial quote before, but it doesn’t hurt to use it again.

“I just wanted to truly say thank you for putting these templates together. I worked on this…last week and it was extremely simple to use and I thought really provided a professional advantage and tool to give the customer….TRULY THANK YOU!”

Comment from one of the client’s employees who used the standard proposal text

While I actively consulted for the firm I maintained the templates, updating as needed as the firm achieved additional certifications.

Why am I telling this story again?

I just want to remind people that Bredemarket doesn’t just write posts, articles, and other collateral. I can also create collateral such as these proposal templates that you can re-use.

So if you have a need that can’t be met by the painfully obvious solutions, talk to me. Perhaps we can develop our own solution.