One of the most significant challenges facing Enterprise sales professionals is how to write winning proposals. We tend to be good at building rapport and engaging customers, yet the arrival of an RFP in our inbox can strike the fear of God into us. To bring value to the community we reached out to our network to find the best person in this space. Jon Williams is the MD of Strategic Proposals, who employ 30 people focusing exclusively on producing winning proposals for their customers.

He's a popular keynote speaker and has published widely on bid and proposal best practice - including the "Proposal Guys" blog, numerous white papers and the book "Proposal Essentials - Win More, Win More Easily” (available on Amazon). He's won a range of industry awards and is a Fellow of APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals). As an APMP Approved Trainer, he's helped over 2,000 candidates to achieve certification.

Enterprise Sales Club co-founder Rob Howes was introduced to Jon and his team ten years ago by Rob Verity, a salesperson Jon had won a big deal with in the past. At this time Rob's company was responding to a huge RFP. Rob - despite being dyslexic - knew it was rubbish. Jon was able to work his magic and help create a winning bid.

1) Can you tell us about your career and some of the key choices you have made?

Jon started out in procurement. As he says: “I started my career on the dark side: I was one of those people who used to send out RFPs giving no notice, asking irrelevant questions and giving bidders too little time to respond effectively!”

During a bid review with a failed vendor, he was offered the job of improving their proposals. He’s spent the last few decades dedicated to this profession and is hugely passionate about raising the standard of proposal writing.

2) In a recent white paper, you describe how the companies that win proposals more often have a Strategic+ approach, can you tell us more about this?

Jon and his team see four stages of evolution of organisations’ proposal capabilities. Their online benchmarking model – the Proposal Benchmarker® - has been completed by nearly 900 companies in the past four years; they now have 100,000 data points. So that lets them compare how the most successful bidders operate, against those who are more run-of-the-mill.

· Ad hoc – the salesperson who receives the RFP has to write the response themselves; everything’s pulled together with buddies and favours and “what did we write on the last one”.

· Tactical – to make life easier for salespeople, companies set up an RFP response factory. The sales lead passes the document over the wall, leaving the bid folks to plug together a complete and compliant response. It’s all very reactive, lacking any magic – more “glorified admin” that a real focus on winning.

· Strategic – where the company has all the right building blocks in place to enable them to do proposals well. Processes are defined for things like “bid / no bid” and strategy development; there’s an experienced bid team. They’ll ask the salespeople the tough questions, trying to get under the skin of the customer’s real need. But it still, somehow, always feels like a challenge!

And what they’ve seen recently is the emergence of a real top tier:

· Strategic+, where proposal development is seen as a source of competitive advantage from the very top. From the CEO down, proposals are seen as critical - the job creation and protection engine of the business. It’s how to drive revenue growth. And everyone’s aligned...

If you have found this podcast valuable, please review, re-share and pass onto a work colleague or someone within your network whom it could help at this stage of their career.

To discover exclusive content for our community, go to https://www.enterprisesalesclub.com.