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O P I N I O N
I s the marketing department in your firm really a proposal department? If it is a proposal department, then you don’t have a marketing department, you have a proposal department. They are not the same thing. Please print them new business cards with an appropriate title. Marketing vs. proposals If your marketing people are writing proposals, then they’re selling, not marketing. You need to know there’s a big difference between the two.
Will Schnier
them, enough to be on the Hot Firm list several years running. It’s just that proposal writing is not the marketing department’s job at our shop. Instead, our marketing team is directed to put the pieces in place that allow our seller-doers to be successful in winning new work. They build and operate our BIG RED Filter. “If you’re writing a proposal, the time for marketing is over. If you’re writing a proposal, you’re now in the selling process, or more specifically, you’re at the point of sale.”
I am regularly meeting with senior leadership from other engineering and architecture firms, and I sincerely believe that they think proposal writing is marketing. If you’re writing a proposal, the time for marketing is over. If you’re writing a proposal, you’re now in the selling process, or more specifically, you’re at the point of sale. Marketing comes before the sales process. Way before. These are really smart people, but they know not their mistake, which I’m content to let them continue to make. Why? It means that our firm, BIG RED DOG (Best Firm Multi-discipline #44 and Hot Firm #65 for 2017), gets to continue marketing, really marketing, and building a brand, while our competitors write proposals. It’s not that we don’t write proposals. We write tons of
See WILL SCHNIER, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 7, 2017, ISSUE 1211
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