There are a number of organizations out there offering A/E/C industry business development and proposal management training. All of these firms have brochures which proclaim that hundreds of A/E/C firms have sent thousands of marketing and other staff members through the training.
I have actually taken one of these multi-day courses and had the opportunity to review the printed materials of two other courses. All three were thick binders with hundreds of pages of text, tables and graphics.
Each offering purports to be "the system" everyone is now using, so each one must be the best system! Right?
For many years, I received emails and printed advertisements for these courses. I deleted or trashed all of them, mostly because I didn't want to do "what everybody else was doing."
Then one day, I got another advertisement in the mail, a large brochure with a detailed course outline, a list of firms that had sent people to the course, and quotes from satisfied customers. Many of those firms were A/E/C firms I knew and respected. So I read and reread the brochure and gave it serious consideration.
I thought to myself,
"The A/E/C industry talks a lot about differentiation today. How can I avoid doing what everyone else is doing if I don't take one of these courses and LEARN what everyone else is learning?"
I didn't have to implement everything that was taught, right? But I did need to know what everyone else was learning.
So I signed up for the next available course, made travel and hotel reservations, and went off to learn "the system."
It was a very instructive two days. There were about 30 people in the class, some from firms I knew or had heard of, and one who was a previous employee of my current firm. We learned system, we learned method, we learned tricks, we learned tips, we learned pitfalls, and we learned the abbreviations unique to that organization's "system."
(You can often tell which course someone has taken by the specific abbreviations he or she uses.)
The instructor was really good. He had many years of experience in A/E/C marketing, and had taught the course before. He covered the materials without going too fast for us to absorb the ideas and left enough time for questions. He was serious when necessary and funny when appropriate. He shared all the information he had. He answered every question we threw at him, regarding both the course materials and our individual experience with proposals. All of his responses hit the mark. He really knew his stuff.
At the end of the course, I felt I had acquired some valuable new information (about 20% of the material). Some of the remainder was information I already knew or processes I deemed inferior to my own. Most important, though, I had some great insights on what not to do because everyone else was doing it.
You can't differentiate yourself by being just like everyone else. And if you learn and use the same system as everyone else, you end up with a product just like everyone else's. But the firms with high win rates achieve them by doing something the rest of the crowd is not doing.
Do these courses really have value?
For me, the answer is "Yes . . . and No."
So I recommend that everyone who takes one of these courses take the materials with a grain of salt--take what you think is good and add it to your process, or if appropriate, fix your process. And let the rest of it sit on the shelf with the workbook.
"Guitar" in front of Frost Bank
(Austin downtown art)