Instead, we’re getting back to brass tacks! I have for you an infographic that’s going to cure your writing block and get you writing compelling content for blogs, industry publications, newsletters, etc.

This one comes from our friends over at copyblogger.com. I typically call BS on these Infographics, but this one is the real deal. It is based on this article and it is full of great tricks. In fact, you’ll notice that I’ve been cheating by doing #4 in SMPS Marketer for the last two years!

The image is embedded below. If you can’t see it, the original version is available here.

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

Pretty cool, huh?

Oh yeah, Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, And Get Home On Time got to #11 on Amazon’s list of top Kindle books on “marketing.” It almost surpassed Seth Godin’s new book. So, thanks to everyone who bought the book!

In the “sales & selling” category, it got to #5 in the Kindle store and stood as the #28 book (e-book and paper) overall. It has been very well received, so far getting five-star reviews.

Ok, get writing!

If you have no interest in how my book is selling, please skip this.

How Are Things Going With The Book?

One of the questions that I keep getting is, “How are things going with the book?” I think people are either curious about whether my book will be a success or they are thinking about self publishing their own book and are wondering if the idea is feasible.

Here is how things are going with Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, And Go Home On Time.

What Was I Trying to Accomplish?

To start off, I had two goals with this book.

1. Get it in as many hands as possible.
2. Explore the feasibility of selling low-priced (and high value) e-books for profit.

I also had a measuring stick to determine whether the exercise was or wasn’t a complete waste of time.

• At least one book sold per day for a year (or 365 paid books)

If I could sell one book a day for a year, I felt the exercise was worth my time.

What Self-Respecting Author Would Give You His Sales Numbers?

The answer to that question is…me. Here are the details of my book “sales.”
I offered the book for free over an initial four-day period. 520 books were downloaded in the US and about 90 books were downloaded in Europe. That totals to a little over 600 books.

Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, And Go Home On Time ranked as the #2 Kindle book in both the Sales & Selling and Marketing categories. That’s not too shabby.

People like FREE. Paying for an e-book is another story. On Wednesday of last week, the book went from FREE to $3.99. As of 2pm on Saturday, I had sold 11 books. That is approximately 2-3 books per day.

As of 2pm on Saturday, Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, And Go Home On Time was listed as the #31 top selling Kindle book in the category of Sales & Selling and #47 in the category of Marketing.

To give you a sense of what that means, under the Marketing category, my book was outselling Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing, The Starbucks Experience, and other well-known books. In the Sales & Selling category, my book was listed as a “hot new release.”

How Many Millions Did I Make?

I take home about $2.70 for each $3.99 book sold. You can do the math and figure out that I’m not making Harry Potter money. So far, I gave away over $2,400 worth of books and came out with about $30.

But think about this, I distributed over 620 books in four days and it cost me nothing. That’s neat.

What People Are Saying About Proposal Development Secrets

Here is a look at what some readers are saying about the book:

Is That What You Wanted To Know?

Did I cover what you wanted to know? Do you want to learn more about how I put together Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, And Go Home On Time, created a Kindle book and sold it on Amazon.com?

If so, leave a comment.

Before I tell you all about it, let me give you a little background.

What I’ve Learned About Proposals

I believe my experience in the world of proposals to be uncommon. I’ve submitted proposals in every state and overseas. I’ve submitted them to public and private clients. I’ve submitted on design, construction, engineer-procure-construct, design-build, consulting, training, and research contracts.

I’ve also priced many proposals, negotiated overhead rates, and performed what many would consider contract administration.

In addition, I’ve spoken in great detail with procurement people and have the stones to ask the questions others may be afraid to.

Ok, Why Should You Care?

Over the last ten years, I’ve developed a series of tactics and tricks that help me develop highly-tailored and pursuasive proposals quicker than you might think possible.

I’ve gathered insights both from my experience and from indepth discussions with ex-procurement officials and former resident engineers. This has allowed me to do things some might consider unlikely, if not impossible.

For example:

• Being awarded contracts with far away clients without developing relationships
• Winning contracts with clients we’ve never worked with before to provide new services, by only submitting a proposal
• Getting a proposal that missed the deadline accepted
• Taking a proposal from rejected to being awarded the contract
• Being awarded large sole-source contracts with large government entities

I’ve gathered up the sum of my experiences and insights and put them into Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, and Go Home On Time, my very first book. I can guarantee that this book contains certain insights and tricks that you don’t know.

My goal was to write a book that was an entertaining and enlightening read about the most dry and boring topic ever, proposals. I believe, and others have confirmed, that I have achieved this goal.

Where To Get It

The book is exclusively available through the Amazon Kindle Store for only $3.99.

In addition, if you are an Amazon Prime member and own a Kindle, you can borrow the book for free through the Amazon Lending Library during the next three months.

But I Don’t Have A Kindle

I wanted this book to be easily available to everyone. You don’t even need a Kindle to read it. There are free Kindle apps for every smartphone, tablet, and computer out there. I’ve included links to the various Kindle readers below. As someone who regularly reads Kindle books on his iPhone, I can tell you that reading books with these apps is a great experience. If you are reading this webpage, you can read my book!

Free Kindle Apps for Phones
* Kindle App for iPhone
* Kindle App for Android
* Kindle App for Blackberry
* Kindle App for Windows 7 Phone

Free Kindle App for iPad
* Kindle App for iPad

Free Kindle Apps for Computers
* Kindle App for Windows PC
* Kindle App for Mac OSX

Read Kindle Books From Your Web Browser
* Kindle Cloud Reader

What’s In It For Me?

There are no “strings attached.”  You get over a decade worth of proposal development insights for only $3.99. But I do ask one favor. Because reviews on Amazon.com are so important, I would love for you to post a review if you decide to download the book. Plus, I’d love to hear feedback from the other proposal developers out there.

Summary

• I’ve crammed my unique insights on proposal development into a new book called, Proposal Development Secrets: Win More, Work Smarter, and Go Home On Time.
• It is available for only $3.99.
• Amazon Prime members can borrow it for FREE during the next three months.
• You don’t need a Kindle, you can read it on any computer. And many people, just like you, have already read it and loved it!
• Please post a review on Amazon.com if you like it as well!

As children, we all knew superheroes. Normal people who were either bit by a radioactive spider, hit with radiation, found some ancient book, or react to the earth’s yellow sun in a way that makes them something beyond human. They can lift more than us, run faster than us, see things we can’t see. These people are given a gift, and they use it for the good of people they care about.

The thing these superheroes value most is their secret. Under the mask or behind the curl, they are like you and me. In a sense, it is the secret that makes them super.

What if we could be more than human when it came to our ability to develop proposals. What if we could be proposal superheroes? What if we had these powerful secrets?

I’m working on something very exciting. It has to do with proposals. I’m not at liberty to discuss it, but now it stands as the best thing I’ve ever done.

I think you’ll agree. It is coming soon and I’ll be able to reveal more shortly.

The following video, which is posted on his website with more detail, talks about his findings.

No only is it an impressive experiment, it is an impressive video. How’d you do it, Tim?

Execution is “the missing link between aspirations and results.” When a strategic plan or initiative gets done right and achieves its objective, it has been executed. Sounds easy enough, but why do marketers find it so hard to execute? Here are some things that stop execution in its tracks and some time on how you, as a marketer, can combat them.

1. Plans with No Clear Actions

Did you ever attend a meeting where an objective was identified, but when you left the meeting you had no idea who was responsible for doing it, how it was going to be done, and when it was going to be complete? My sense is you have. This is a prime example of making plans without clear actions.

Don’t leave a meeting until you clarify what the objective is (what does it look like when it’s “done”), who will be held accountable for making sure it gets done, and before you have identified clear milestones.

2. Delegation without Follow-Through

Follow-through is essential to execution. However, many managers and leaders will delegate tasks but will never follow-through to see that they have been done. I often give the analogy of the famous basketball player, Shaquille O”Neil (Shaq). After Shaq shoots the basketball, what does he do? Does he turn around and start running to go play defense? No. He runs towards the basket. He confirms that the ball went in the basket or he tries to grab a rebound. When you delegate a task, always follow through and make sure it gets done.

3. Not Knowing Your Business and Unrealistic Goals

“Let’s grow by 15% this year,” sounds great. But what does that mean in revenue? Do you have the resources and capacity to grow 15%? I fear that many people set goals without basing them on anything, let alone reality.

Don’t set a goal without knowing how exactly you are going to achieve it.

4. Too Many Objectives/Priorities

The marketer who says, “I have 10 priorities,” has no priorities and no concept of what priorities are. To have three priorities would be a lot. You are more likely to execute if you and your team focus on one or two clear priorities.

It’s taken me a while, but I’ve read through the book and here is my review.

I’ve met Brent Darnell a few times and I’ve seen him speak. I even mentioned him in my presentation at the 2011 Build Business conference. He is a very nice guy.

Emphasizing “emotional intelligence,” Brent consults the construction industry on the soft skills. As we now, the hard skills are easy, the soft skills are hard.

He’s got his work cut out for him. Getting construction folk to embrace yoga and compassion ranks up there in difficulty with getting a cat to do the waltz.

More than anything, The People Profit Connection is the story of Brent’s struggles and successes in this pursuit.

Brent whole-heartedly believes anything is possible, if you just believe. After losing his glasses in a river while on an overseas stint, he comes back the next day, dives into the river, and finds them.

The demonstrations of his concepts are almost so unbelievable they seem like magic tricks. Just look at the video or link below to watch how he demonstrates the effect your positive or negative thoughts can have on other people.

I bet that video shows something you would never had imagined possible (unless you saw the movie “Scanners“).

You might even find this kind of stuff a little weird. But as Brent explains in his book:

“I want to be that weird guy who is passionate about what he does and gets great results even though people look at him as someone who is a little bit out there.”

His wife looks at him and says:

“You teach emotional intelligence, yoga, and meditation to contractors. I think you are that guy.”

Brent’s overarching philosophy is if you improve your people, you’ll improve your profits.

The People Profit Connection is not what I would consider a “how to book.” While Brent does talk about the tests and tactics he uses, as well as, the principles of emotional intelligence, he uses his direct experiences in the construction industry to illustrate many of the concepts.

The step-by-step process outlined in the book includes steps like “hire the right consultant.” So, the book’s focus is on improving a team or organization’s performance. And as Brent recommends, this is going to require buy in and involvement from leadership. It will also require a little outside help.

With that said, I’m not sure the People Profit Connection is the book marketing coordinators or even marketing directors should run out and buy. However, it might make a worthwhile present for your principal, president, or CEO.

Or if you would enjoy a story about one man’s journey as he tries to dramatically change an industry, it might be worth picking up.

You can buy a copy of the People Profit Connection here. Brent also has a lot of free content and tools over at his website.

I know this will make its way to Brent. So if he’d like to write a piece on how individual marketers might improve their emotional intelligence, we’d be more than happy to post it at HelpEverybodyEveryday.com.

Matt Handal: What was the marketing coordinator job like at Pennoni? Doesn’t Pennoni have an extremely productive and efficient proposal operation?

Rachel Yoka: Day one when I walked into Pennoni, I was surprised by the volume. I wasn’t used to working on 30 proposals in a month. It is really good practice.

M: That’s because it is a centralized marketing department?

R: Yes, at the time it was a very centralized operation serving all thirteen offices. At that point, we were doing everything on paper. There were not many electronic submissions.

M: So, tell me about your progression while at Pennoni.

R: I like to say that I cut my teeth there and learned so much about how to do proposals and respond to client’s need. But more importantly, I learned about time management and personal management. If you have 10 proposals going out in two days and you don’t organize your time, you are never leaving. It was very important to me to get things done quickly. That’s really where I learned to use my time well.

M: I think it is good to be schooled in those situations where you have too much to do versus learning the ropes at a firm where you may not have those demands.

R: You can always do fewer things. But if you know how to manage multiple deadlines, it’s invaluable. I think that’s part of why I ended up doing some project management for TimHaahs. It is something that applies to many aspects of business.

There are only so many things you can do before you don’t do any of them well. You can only cut the pie so thin. I really feel that three to four major pieces is when you begin to get stretched, because you are not devoting enough of your time, focus, or energy to any of those things.

When my pie started to get to five or six pieces, I needed to re-examine what I was doing. I think that’s what many people are questioning in the market place, “where am I giving the most value and where should I be focusing more of my time?”

M: I think that’s a very hard thing to do. When I came to this office, we had a marketing coordinator (me), a business developer manager, and a marketing director. Now, that’s me. So, there are too many hats.

R: And something has to go.

M: Lots of things go. You can’t do in 2,000 hours everything that was done with 6,000 hours.

R: And that’s the thing, they either go by choice or it goes by the wayside and gets lost. There are just so many hours in the day.

You should consciously divide the pie. You should figure out where you are having the impact. Then, make the decision to do this and stop doing that. It’s going to get lost anyway. I think we are under the impression that we can do it all. We just add one more thing, one more thing, and then one more thing. As a result, some of it starts not getting done well. That’s a position none of us want to be in.

You need to be focused on those three to four areas (or more if you can really handle it).

M: Like you said, there are three to four major pieces. Beyond that, it’s very hard to keep everything together.

R: And it’s not just keeping it together, it’s doing it well. If you are not doing it well, why are you doing it? Your impact just isn’t there if you are not doing it well. That’s my take.

You strive to do everything well and you do your best. But you have to make the decision and say some things just won’t get done if this is the way we are structured.  I think most management and leadership recognizes this, but it sometimes goes unspoken.

M: You moved into a BD role in a time where it seems to me that the role of the business developer may be becoming somewhat of an endangered species. What’s your take on that?

R: I think that depends upon the organization. We don’t have dedicated business development personnel.

For me, I have a multi-faceted role. I’m managing all the marketing efforts, communications, public relations, and all that goes with that. I’m also doing business development and sustainability consulting. So, I’m not a dedicated business developer either.

M: I know you use Dragon (speech recognition). I got it. I was showing it to my boss. It’s a great idea. But just the fact that it’s not 100% accurate, is a huge problem.

R: I feel that even with some of the mistakes, it saves me a lot of time when getting stuff out of my brain and onto the paper. Then later, I clean up.

M: I’m fast with the writing, so I just keep the cursor moving. Then I go back and edit it.

I was talking to a real estate agent that says he gets someone else to write his listings because he’ll write for an hour and only come up with two sentences.

R: No, you just have to start and keep going. I’m sorry you don’t like it. You should ask for your money back.

M: When you wear so many different hats, how do you manage that? How do you determine what you are doing today?

R: I’m a big list maker. I still do that, for the most part, manually. In our office, we all have our black books. We use that to write down everything. It’s a cultural thing at our firm. When you are hired, they give you a book. If you are sitting with Tim and he asks you to do something, you write it down in the book.

M: So, you are a paper person?

R: Not completely.  I have my iPad and iPhone. I organize many tasks on email. But when it comes to strategizing my day, I manually write out a list.

That’s how I do it because then I know what I absolutely must do each day. But you always have to leave room, because the “absolutely must do” changes. You can get a phone call at 4pm from a potential client who says they need a custom qualifications package and that’s what you do.

M: You can get that one email that completely changes your day.

R: I have a team that’s so great. It’s nice to be able to say, “can you do this?” and know that, once you pass it off to that person, you don’t need to worry about it.  That is outstanding.

People who work as hard as I do, those are the people I want on my team. Your plans can get derailed, but you need to know which things need to be done and which can be pushed. That’s the art of balancing the day. But, you know, then your kid gets an earache and you have to work from home. You need to be able to work from anywhere.

M: I’m moving to paper in January, primarily because of syncing issues.

R: You are moving to paper? You are moving backwards.

M: Some people might think that’s insane, but the people you talk to who really have their stuff together always use paper.

R: I’m a Kinesthetic learner. When I write things down, they become ingrained in the way I think and what I’m doing. I will remember them later. It will come back to me because I wrote it down.

The act of writing down something is very powerful. It’s not the same as typing it on a keyboard. It is like the difference between reading a book and reading something on the screen.

I’m sure there are people whose iPhones organize their entire life. I’m just not there yet.

M: But now that iPhone has to play nice with your computers and other devices.

R: The management of your IT becomes interesting. We have all these devices and all of these email accounts. They are all demands on our time.

Knowing you can work on something and turn off your email is invaluable. Yet, there are so few people who do it. If the building is burning down, they are going to tell you. If your “A #1” client calls you, they’ll tell you. I don’t know what you could miss if you turn off your email. I find that those are my most productive times.

We have an open door policy in our office. Anybody can go to anyone at any time. So, very few people shut their doors. Once Tim realized that I was shutting my door to do something I considered a priority, he came in and made the comment, “I want to see your door shut more often.”

I’m pleased that I have that ability. I also think giving your staff that ability is important too.

Building the $7,000 A/E/C Corporate Website

Setting the Challenge

How the challenges and key requirements for our new website led me to conclude that the typical process wouldn’t work.

Design

How I spent $325 and walked away with design concepts for our website.

Goals of the Text

Setting up goals for your website text.

Major Concepts

Why I added two blogs and decided not to spam.

Bring on the Consultants

How I selected a writer and developer to finish the website.

The Technologies

How HTML5, mail chimp, RSS, markdown, and other technologies are incorporated into the $7,000 A/E/C corporate website.

Efficiency sometimes gets a bad rap. Efficient means achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. You can do something wrong very efficiently. Or you can do something right, but do it very inefficiently.

I think the concept is somewhat misunderstood. Consider this math problem:

Let us suppose you are working on a proposal. Two proposal coordinators, who each make $10/hr, could get the proposal together in 20 hours. However, the proposal manager, who is paid $100/hr, could put together the proposal in five hours. Which option is more efficient?

If you said it is more efficient for the proposal manager to do it, you are dead wrong. That’s right, you’re wrong.

It costs $500 for the proposal manager to do it and only $400 for the proposal coordinators to put the proposal together.

Efficiency doesn’t care if the end product is better. It doesn’t care whether it is harder on those poor proposal coordinators. Efficiency only cares about resources.

Effectiveness, on the other hand, cares whether what you are doing will produce the best results. To some degree, all of us are effective. All of our firms are, to some degree, effective.

Efficiency and effectiveness can work together or work against each other.

For example, if your accounting systems aren’t set up effectively, you wont be able to identify your best clients efficiently. Oh, you can still do it. It just might take a while.

On the other hand, because it would be so inefficient to dig into the data and analyze your client base, some might argue that it is not an effective use of time. Inefficiency can cause reluctance.

The degree to which you are effective is based on the proper and efficient execution of the right actions.

Efficiency and effectiveness are both important.

The complaints I hear most often are of A/E/C firms that are doing the wrong things, poorly and inefficiently. Yet, they may be reluctant to change because they have experienced some effectiveness over the years (otherwise, they wouldn’t be in business).

It is true that you should focus more on being effective than efficient. But it is important to understand the relationship between the two.