As a business owner, we know you recognize that you are ultimately responsible for achieving excellence in business development, which requires constant honing of your skills.
Proposal professionals must constantly look for new training and professional challenges. You must document your accomplishments, and build your resume to produce greater results and increase compensation and freedom. You should strive to do your job faster and better, which makes you irreplaceable. You’ll then achieve a high quality of life, which this profession tends to rob people of.
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Taking charge of your business development education gives you the power to:
- Grow your company
- Stay in high demand
- Be more effective at your job
- Take control of your employability
- Find more fulfillment in your work
There are four categories that require continuous development:
- Your skills
- Your understanding of the rules,
- Knowledge of new trends
- Knowledge of new resources
Let’s discuss each of them briefly.
Always Work on Developing New Skills
Consider the continuum of the business development lifecycle and the skills required for each activity. The range of skills starts with strategy/business development and continues to:
- Account management
- Capture management
- Cost strategy
- Proposal management
- A variety of proposal support functions:
- Writing
- Reviewing
- Editing
- Graphics
- Pricing
- Desktop publishing
Business owners struggle to find great strategists, business developers, and capture managers. For proposal professionals, your pay is higher for strategy, business development, and capture, but lower for proposal skills.
If you are a business owner, focus on the front end of the BD lifecycle. If you are a proposal manager, push yourself to learn capture and vice versa. Proposal and capture managers alike should learn how to write compelling technical sections, manage price volumes, conceptualize graphics, become fluent in Microsoft Word, and so on.
The more skills you master, the better you become in your area of focus, and the more value you provide to your company.
The Ever Changing Rules of Federal Contracting
The Government contracting world is constantly changing. Every year an influx of new rules impacts procurements, teaming, pricing, and so on. If you don’t constantly keep track of the changes in the industry, you fall out of date. Then your effectiveness as a business developer decreases.
Knowledge of New Trends in the Government Market
The Government market is a dynamic environment. For example, now it’s imperative to have a portfolio of GSA schedules and vehicles. The GSA drives much of the IDIQ business their way, swallowing other agencies’ indefinite delivery vehicles and budget dollars. They have pushed “scored” RFPs for IDIQs with emphasis on a company’s credentials and past performance. Other agencies have noticed.
Many companies missed simple steps to qualify and won’t have a chance to make the cut-off score. As a result, many companies lost their seats at the multibillion-dollar table and undermined their business leadership’s confidence in their proposal staff.
New Resources Make You More Efficient and Effective
Our ability to be productive is increasing with each technological advance and new market offering.
Are productivity tools such as the Hemingway app or PerfectIt on your radar?
What about the newly added functions in BGov that help your competitive analysis?
Do you understand the new tools available to build your proposals faster and collaborate more effectively? What apps do you use to speed up your brainstorming and writing tasks?
These advances make you better at winning, and winning is what counts in our profession more than anything else.
Take advantage of the Cyber Monday Bid & Proposal Academy sale, which is our only sale of the year at 35% off every course. This 35% extends to all of our self-study products as well. We continuously update our material to help you in all four categories we explored. We want you to get sharper and more competitive for the evolving market. This promotion expires at 11:59 pm on Friday, December 6th, 2019. Use the code THANKYOU2019 at check out.
Contact us to learn more.
