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Bill Gregoire is a proposal professional with over 16 years of experience in the field. He has been a proposal coordinator, proposal writer, proposal manager, senior proposal manager, and is currently a proposal director at a U.S. defense contractor. He is certified at the Practitioner level by the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Writing and History from the University of Massachusetts – Lowell.

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Joe Sangillo Weidling is the Senior Director of Bid Proposal Operations at Discovery Education, a leading ed tech provider of digital curriculum solutions throughout the world. Joe manages a team responsible for crafting winning proposals of Discovery Education’s products and services to school districts and state/national departments of education.  Prior to joining Discovery Education in 2014, Joe worked for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland, one of the largest school districts in the United States. Joe began his career in MCPS as a classroom teacher, then a department chair, and then a social studies content specialist before making the leap to Discovery Education to build an RFP operation from the ground up.  During his years managing Discovery Education’s RFP team, Joe has increased RFP volume 700%, which has correlated to a massive increase in Discovery Education revenue attributed to RFP’s.

Joe earned his Master of Arts degree in Government from The Johns Hopkins University, and 2 Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Maryland in U.S. History and Social Studies Education.

 

Joe lives in San Diego, CA with his husband and enjoys spending time with their dog, Teddy. When not heads down in RFP land, Joe enjoys reading, exercise, and relaxing on San Diego’s beaches.   

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 Anne has been working for 7 years at enexdi and 16 years of professional business development experience, Anne provides responsive, pleasant and professional service to help clients develop compelling, winning proposals. She served 5 years on the APMP-NCA Board of Directors as the Corporate Partner Chair and won the 40 under 40 award for APMP in 2019. Anne is a graduate of Wake Forest University where she earned a degree in Sociology. In her free time, Anne enjoys playing tennis, hiking and traveling with her husband and dog. 

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Six Steps To a Successful Proposal​ 

• Strategy - Whether a marketing novice or seasoned professional, gain knowledge from pre-planning practices that will set you and your team off on the right path.
• Start-Up - The pursuit has received the green light. Where to start? You'll acquire the tools to organize every single person and task.
• Management - Practices and approach on maintaining the proposal schedule.
• Content - Guidance on getting content, developing content, and what to do with all those graphics.
• Review - Pink, Red, & Gold. Why all the reviews? Learn what should be included and the benefits of each stage.
• Closeout - There is a lot to be learned in these final steps that shouldn't be overlooked.

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Hillary brings over 15 years of experience stemming from broadcast journalism, proposal management, capture, business development, client and account management, and marketing and communications to the table. With a diverse background she has worked with clients and accounts in the federal, commercial and nonprofit space. An active member of the APMP NCA Chapter, 40 Under 40 2018 Class, Presenter and Panelist at APMP Bid and Proposal Con 2017 and 2018, Hillary Fredrick is a seasoned veteran in proposal management with experience in planning large corporate events and logistics.

Today, she is a Senior Marketing Manager for Maximus, focused on brand elevation and engagement, marketing strategy and execution for Maximus’ federal services.  

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Richard is a Director at BrightCarbon, the specialist presentation and eLearning agency. He has helped to write and create thousands of presentations, and coached hundreds of teams to present more effectively using visuals, diagrams, and animated sequences that explain and reinforce the key points. 

Bullet Points on Topic:

- Successful pitches need to convey the key reasons why a prospect will benefit from working with you, and how that's better than the alternatives. How do you create a persuasive story to frame your offering in the best light? 

- Visuals are a great way of helping people understand your story easily, from bold key messages to elegant representations of complex concepts. What are some of the techniques you can use to achieve this? 

- Providing a clear structure to the story so that your audience understand where they are in the flow and how it all works together is vital, especially with large bid teams, each with their own section to listen to. Hear how you can structure and compartmentalize a pitch to make it both easy to follow and reinforce your key value messages. 

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Thilinie Horne has been working in proposals for 6 years, more recently as a proposal coach and providing bid management to teams and facilitating key interventions such as bid/no bid, kick off, win theme workshops, storyboarding and review sessions. She also provides pitch coaching, for both face to face and virtual settings and supports teams and individuals to answer the client's brief, whilst providing a client centric story and emphasising win themes. She carries out internal lessons learnt with bid teams to ensure continuous improvement is embedded in each proposal, along with carrying out client debriefs.

Thilinie is APMP 40 under 40 winner 2020, Women in Bids and Proposals Midlands, Regional Leader, APMP Assistant to Membership Director and achieved Highly Commended in Bid Solutions Rising Stars Award 2017.

She is currently working as a Bid Manager at Gulp Digital. 

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Stephanie Schmidt is a senior proposal coordinator in the A/E/C industry, specializing in strategic pursuit opportunities. She has worked in the industry since 2014 and has served in proposal development roles for over 5 years.

Stephanie is dedicated to continuous education and professional development. She recently completed her MBA at Arizona State University and is an active member of APMP. Stephanie recently resumed her role as the Communication Director on the Board of the APMP Western Chapter and is currently taking the Dale Carnegie leadership and communications training course.

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Paul is Head of Group Tendering for Eurofins Forensic Services, part of the international life sciences and testing group Eurofins, where his role encompasses bidding, commercial and legal advisory services. With almost 25 years in sales roles, of which 15 have been in bid/tender functions, his bidding career has come through the defence and security sector into forensics. He is accredited at Professional level and has won bids into Bluelight customers, local councils, corporates, national Governments, the UK Ministry of Defence, the US Department of Defense and the United Nations. He is also a mentor on the APMPUK Rapport mentor programme.

Focal Points: 

• why scoring criteria are used
• that submissions will be assessed, not read (this feeds into my 'writing for impact' module) and that it will be scored against the criteria, not necessarily against the competition
• How evaluation scoring can differ in terms of approach, talking about a few of the different schemes I've seen and the differences and how to read the criteria to determine how best to climb the score scheme (again, that it's not the best writing but answering in a way that matches the scoring scheme)
• How question weightings can help you determine where to spend effort  (e.g. movement of 1 consensus point on a 75% weighted question scored 1-5 has a bigger impact than the whole of a 5% question)
  
  
• Then there's looking at the questions and determining what they're asking.  My sector is notorious for questions with multiple dimensions, and  unobvious hidden questions that if you can tease them out, can make it more difficult for other bidders to come off as compliant as you are against the question and therefore against the scoring criteria.
• Then there's the use of a compliance matrix to make sure your response and subsequent submission hit all of those areas as well as other things that tie the company into the contract - which, again, SMEs who only look at the specification may often not be aware of... and that the compliance matrix can feed into subsequent proceed/halt gates.​

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