Fro those involved in Sales or Marketing, Klariti (www.klariti.com) have just updated their White Paper templates. In the IT industry, white papers and case studies are often produced in tandem, as they are both used as sales collateral. However, white papers, its important to note, are not technical documents per se. From a business viewpoint, [...]

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Matthew Gnabasik in his book “Smart Choices: Selecting and Administering A Safe 401(k) Plan” provides some good advice on common mistakes in the vendor selection process. The 401kHelpCenter.com site have paraphrased some of them. Not Asking Enough Tough Questions: You decide to ask for help in the search process and turn to a broker or [...]

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Darren Rowse is a must read for anyone interested in making money from blogging. “At least one commenter on the previous post noted that they are happy with a low page view count because it could mean people are leaving their blog by clicking on an advertisement and thereby earning them money. While there could [...]

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Case Studies are one of the most effective tools you can use to promote your products and services, especially if you are on a limited marketing budget. According to market research, next to White Papers, they are the second most popular device used to advance the benefits of a product or service. In addition to [...]

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I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on Bud Porter-Roth’s site. It’s hard to find anything better when it comes to offering practical and informative proposal writing techniques. Unlike many pretenders, when you read Bud’s material, you know that this man definitely knows what he’s talking about. Worth book-marking!http://www.erms.com/resource.htm And while I’ve read—and re-read—several [...]

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Hi Folks, I had the good pleasure to interview Ron Sheer, who raises some very interesting points about the benefits of using plain English (aka plain language) techniques when preparing business correspondence. His own site also has some terrific material. His keep-it-simple approach is based on two user-centered principles: Make information easy to find. Then [...]

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Writing a Request for Proposal (also called an Invitation To Tender) is hard work. After you have polished the final draft and sent it out, the next step is to wait for the proposals to come back in. If you’re working on a large tender, you can sometimes expect 20,30, 50 or even hundreds of [...]

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Government contracting is big business. Companies invest considerable resources into their bids and depend on winning contracts to support their business. To keep the tendering process more transparent, there is now formal tender opening procedures where the tenders are officially opened. For Europe Union contracts, this process often occurs in public to ensure that all [...]

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Proposal writers often write at high-speed, under intense pressure to complete the bid on time, while ensuring the all aspects of the response are in agreement with the mandatory RFP guidelines. Not an easy task! In such situations, mistakes are bound to happen. Even more significantly, such working conditions compromise the quality of the bid. [...]

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Successful proposals place the emphasis on the client’s needs rather than on your abilities, technology, or experience, regardless of their technical merit. Novice proposal writers tend to hype their own products/services and relegate the client’s needs to second place. For example, a proposal for a Content Management system would list must-have technology features and new [...]

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