Marketing: Marketing is a huge umbrella that incorporates many things. Strategy and planning is critical, competitive intelligence, business development, as well as advertising, an effective web presence, and other marketing tools should be implemented to raise the profile of your company in the selection process. For example, if the selection committee wants to know more about your company, it is critical that you have a website that they can visit. It is important to have met the representatives of the municipality. Knowing your competitions strengths and weaknesses is critical in the preparation of the CMAR proposal. Immediate steps for your company to take:

• Create a plan to prepare and execute qualification-based work. Decide what types of projects you would like to pursue, the public entities for which you want to work, what your company’s “differentiator” and who your likely competitors will be. Completing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is a good idea.
• Create or “tune-up” your website.
• Meet the municipal representatives that handle the selection process (this varies from city to city.)
• Ask to see the proposals or marketing materials of your competitors that have been submitted to the municipality. (These are publicly available documents.)
• Comb the Capital Improvement Plans (CIP) for the public entities you want to pursue.

Proposals: After you have laid the groundwork with marketing, the next important step is putting together a comprehensive, responsive, persuasive, and visually-appealing proposal document. Although every proposal should be customized, advance preparation of a company biography, resumes of the key project members, project sheets, descriptions of cost and quality control will help to prepare for the proposals. Important steps for your company to take include:

• Prepare resumes
• Prepare a company description
• Prepare project sheets including project descriptions, photos of the projects, dates of completion, approximate construction value, client reference, and key team members.
• Prepare a description of the quality control measures your company uses.
• Prepare a description of the cost control steps your company takes to keep a project on budget.

Presentations: If your company is selected for the “short list” to be interviewed for the project, it is important to have a team that can effectively and persuasively speak in front of an audience. If you do not have people naturally gifted at this skill, hiring a presentation coach makes sense. High Impact Communications is a good resource for this specialized skill.

The proposal-based process can be very costly. Results are directly correlated with the level of effort applied to the preparation and execution of your plan to win work in the qualification-based selection process.

 

Mind the_Gap Marketing Solutions is a marketing firm that helps companies implement results-based marketing. They provide the planning and tools, like proposals, email marketing, websites, advertising, direct mail, etc. They have special knowledge in design and construction-related companies. They can be reached at www.mindthegapco.com or 602.633.3035.