What’s your success ratio with proposals? 25% is average. Very few get 50%. I help government agencies evaluate proposals. Most bids that come across my desk make the same errors, use the same flawed strategies and are never accepted. And the next time, they repeat the same mistake. Here are some ways to avoid [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Strategy'
How To Ensure Your Proposal Gets Accepted By Difficult Evaluators
March 19th, 2010 · View Comments · Business Development
Tags:Case Study·conditions·Costs·EOI·Evaluate·Proposal·Proposal Manager·Requirement. Bid·RFP·Strategy·Terms
100 Words You Need To Speak Any Language even Chinese and Ancient Greek
February 25th, 2010 · View Comments · China
Did you ever wish you could speak French and read all those great novels? Or maybe Spanish, so you could travel to South America and have more than Buenos Dias? Or Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. Most of us never start. It’s too hard. But, if I told you that all you need is 100 words [...]
Tags:Branding·Business·Career·Development·education·Innovation·language·Self-Confidence·Strategy
The Right Way To Comment On Chris Brogan’s Blog
February 20th, 2010 · View Comments · ProBlogging
What’s the right way to comment on other people’s blogs? Ari reckons that comments should be unique. Don’t write the same comment on every blog; don’t drone on if your point can be made quicker. Be unique, quick & current. I agree with the first two but not the third. How you comment on other [...]
Tags:Branding·Chris Brogan·Market research·Positioning·ProBlogger·Strategy·Thought Leadership·Web Marketing·writing
What Amazon Can Learn from Taobao, the Largest Chinese Ecommerce Portal
February 16th, 2010 · View Comments · China
Taobao.com is the 11th most successful website in the world. It makes more money than most all US ecommerce sites, except Amazon, and this may be about to change. The way ecommerce works in China is different than in Europe and the US. Partly this is to do with low credit card penetration, complex delivery logistics and customer support.
Tags:Amazon·Asia·Chinese·credit cards·Cross-selling·ecommerce·Logistics·Marketing·Strategy·Taobao·Training
5 Way To Market New Web Products
February 14th, 2010 · View Comments · Product Development
April Dunford gives five great tips on how to market your web product to early adopters. She asks how can you blend marketing and product development to increase adoption, in particular by those who are likely to champion your product before it goes main-stream. Geoffrey Moore covered this in Crossing the Chasm and Inside [...]
Tags:Competition·Design·Innovation·Marketing·Pricing·Product Development·Product Launch·requirements·Strategy
The Dunning-Kruger Effect & How To Fail Slowly
February 9th, 2010 · View Comments · Strategy
Have you noticed this obsession with speed? Everyone is doing things, real fast. Even failure has to be fast. Fail fast is the new mantra. Christopher S. Penn takes up this point, ‘Ever done this? You see a traffic jam ahead, get off at the next exit, and spend 30 extra minutes on side and back roads to go around the jam… which in reality is only a 10 minute traffic jam? This is the dabbler. This is the person who fails too fast.’ Do you fail too fast?
Tags:Business·China·Chris Brogan·Christopher S. Penn·Dunning–Kruger effect·Failure·Leadership·Motivation·Skills·Strategy
Using Google’s Wonder Wheel for Mind Mapping & Generating New Ideas
February 2nd, 2010 · View Comments · Business Model, Google, How To, Productivity
Google’s Wonder Wheel is Search and Mind Mapping combined together. The Wonder Wheel was introduced in May 2009 and is one of Google’s best kept secrets. This search/mindmapper tool shows search results in a Wheel with different Spokes for each associated search result. Fantastic tool for brainstorming, studying trends, and idea generation.
Tags:Brainstorming·Crowdsourcing·Darren Rowse·Innocation·Mind Mapping·Searching·Strategy·trends
What Avatar Can Teach You About Project Management 2.0
January 31st, 2010 · View Comments · How To
What’s the one thing you enjoyed the most in Avatar? For my pm friend is was the video logging. Did you notice that the team kept their reports not in Microsoft Word (i.e. on paper) but as video logs. When trying it out, the protagonist in the movie couldn’t get a handle on it. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to it’, was the reply. Well, it worked for them, could it work for you?
Tags:Innovation·iPhone·Project management·reporting·search·Strategy·Video
12 Steps To Getting Started as a Business Consultant
January 26th, 2010 · View Comments · Business Model, Career, Strategy
Most people think it’s difficult start a career as a business consultant. I used to think the same in my early 20s when I started in IT. In retrospect, I should have made more efforts to establish myself as a consultant earlier; the benefits certainly outweigh the downsides. As luck would have it, I was forced into a consultancy role when I lost my 9-5 job. Time to learn to hustling and bring in business.
Tags:Business·Career·Chris Brogan·Consultant·Harvard Business Review·Linkedin·management·Management consulting·Richard Branson·Strategy·Tom Peters
How Would You Re-Define BMW’s Innovation Philosophy?
January 25th, 2010 · View Comments · Business Model, Strategy
How do you define innovation? Graham Horton has translated BMW’s definition of innovation for those who don’t speak German. I (used to) speak a little German and hope to get the original translation from Graham.
Tags:BMW·brand·Innovation·Marketing·Mission·Philosophy·Strategy·Values·Vision
IBM: How To Monetize Your Social Network & Why Every Email is worth 948 dollars!
November 28th, 2009 · Comments Off · Social Media
How do I make money from my Social Network? IBM has the answer.
Mark reports here that IBM researcher Ching Yun Lin gave an interesting talk about the monetary value of having friends today at Web 2.0 Expo in New York.
Tags:ibm·Monitization·O'Reilly Radar·Social network·Strategy·web 2.0
What is the ’search, compare, verify’ generation?
October 24th, 2009 · Comments Off · Productivity
Image via Wikipedia
Gerry Mcgovern Success on the Web is not about making customers do what you want. It is about helping customers do what they want.
My Lenovo laptop has great battery life. The battery lasts for 650 thousand million years if I don’t turn it on, and for 65 thousand million years if I turn [...]
Tags:Advertising·Battery·Business·Consumer·content management·Customer service·Marketing·Mobile Phone·Strategy·Technology·user interface·Vodafone
Future of Technical Documentation, problem with user-generated content in Open Source projects
October 4th, 2009 · Comments Off · Technical Writing
Elllis, over on the Cherryleaf Technical Authors Blog, points out 5 secrets regarding the future of technical documentation.
Here are the key points:
Tags:Cherryleaf Technical Authors·Content·content management·google·Open Source·planning·Publishing·Strategy·Style Guides·Technical documentation·Technical Editing·wiki
