Selling Power Blog

Problems with Predictable Revenue: Why It's Not a Solution for Every Sales Team

Today’s post is by Steve Richard, co-founder and chief revenue officer at ExecVision, a leading conversation intelligence platform. He’s also the co-founder of Vorsight, a leading outsourced appointment setting company.

 

I’ll preface this by saying this isn’t a personal attack on Aaron Ross. I have a ton of a respect for the man as a sales strategist and human being. Aaron has been a driving force behind the sales development revolution that is helping companies grow faster than ever before. He’s also adopted a ton of kids and is an all-around good person.

Predictable Revenue has been called a bible for sales organizations and appears on a number of “Top Sales Books” lists, but that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. The book carries the common cry that cold calling is dead. It goes on to outline a method where a sales development rep (SDR) sends around 100 emails a week to senior executives and CEOs asking for a referral to the right person. Somewhere between 7-20 percent of these emails get a response, leaving the SDRs a “warm” referral to work from.

Sounds great, right? The Predictable Revenue model has worked – and continues to work – for many companies; but. like all things, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model for sales. Here are some of the common issues with the Predictable Revenue model.

1. The Model Was Not Built for Enterprise Selling

The Predictable Revenue Model is a numbers game. For it to work, you need to be selling into a vertical that has thousands of potential customers. What you sell, who you sell to, and your demand type all affect your sales strategy. For those selling to a few large companies, there just aren’t enough targetable accounts for Predictable Revenue to work.

Enterprise sales is all about SDRs digging into accounts to uncover the various business units – and the decision makers within them. Emailing the CEO of a company like Bank of America is unlikely to get you anywhere. The company is just too large for one executive to know who are the right decision makers in all of its business units.

The exception to this is a bottom-up prospecting strategy, where you target a role in an enterprise organization that has several individuals, such as mid-level managers, all performing the same task. 

2. There Are Not Enough Accounts as You Scale

If you’re targeting mid-market companies with 1,000+ employees, Issue #1 clearly doesn’t apply to you. There are plenty of companies in that market. At first, the Predictable Revenue model works great…until your team scales past a certain point.

More SDRs means fewer accounts per SDR, so sending out hundreds of emails each week isn’t effective anymore. This creates an even bigger issue with the reps who have grown comfortable relying on email. They’ll have to pick up the phone – and, for reps who haven’t made an “unexpected sales call” recently (or ever), it’s not going to be pretty.

3. It Creates Conversation Atrophy

The Predictable Revenue model creates reps who rely on email alone to schedule first meetings. That’s fine – until reps start getting fewer replies and need to get on the phone to hit their numbers. It’s because the reps suffer from a phenomenon we’ll call “Conversation Atrophy.” Like muscles, conversation skills atrophy when you don’t use them regularly. Reps unused to cold calling will fumble with starting a conversation that leads to a meeting.

Long term, conversation atrophy can lead to lost career opportunities. SDRs without solid conversational skills won’t be able to break into account executive and client success roles. While it’s one of the hardest skills to learn in sales, the ability to strike up a conversation with someone who hadn’t been planning to speak with you will take you far in your career.

4. Recent Grads and Green Reps Lack the Skills for Discovery Calls

In the book, Aaron highlights that the Salesforce SDRs would take the meetings they scheduled from email referrals and conduct those calls themselves to separate the real opportunities from the tire kickers. Having SDRs do the qualifying meetings is a sound idea, but many organizations fail to execute it effectively.

Most organizations fill their sales development teams with fresh college grads and people making that transition into sales. These reps can get only so far into discovery and qualification calls with business leaders. If your qualification process is straightforward like it was at Salesforce, this isn’t a huge issue.

It does create an issue for organizations that need subject matter experts to complete the qualification process. Green reps won’t be able to articulate the various use cases or understand the metrics different executives care about. If the SDRs are failing to succeed with discovery calls, it creates friction with the account executive team that is seeing a lower conversion rate because of it.

5. Green Field vs Brown Field

The Predictable Revenue method was wildly successful at Salesforce, Acquia, and other companies, but it failed for other organizations that also sell into the SMB space. Why? The answer lies within the third leg of the sales strategy stool: demand type.

The are four types of demand: same old, better mousetrap, evangelical, and government regulation. Alan Nance simplifies it into “green field” vs “brown field.” In the early days, SFDC was operating in a green field –  a wide-open, untouched market for cloud CRM. Now, SFDC operates in a brown field where every CRM solution needs to convince prospects it’s worth putting out a better mousetrap. Predictable Revenue emails aren’t very effective for established markets because the executives reading them will think, “We already have a solution for X…why look at another one?”

What Predictable Revenue Got Right

There is no denying that Aaron Ross made a big splash when he released Predictable Revenue in 2012. While I may not agree with everything in the book, there are some things he got 100 percent right:

• Prior to the book, the role we now know as “sales development representative” wasn’t clearly labeled. When I first started in the industry at CEB, we were called “marketing associates.” Now, the SDR/BDR/BDA terminology is much more universal.
  
  
• The concept of personalization at scale. You can’t send generic emails off to executives and expect to get the referral.
  
  
• Going after the portion of the market that’s susceptible to looking – or in an active buying cycle. Research shows that only a small percentage of prospects will be in an active buying cycle. Predictable Revenue provides a framework for addressing that and lessens the extremes of prospecting ad hoc.
  
  
• I’ll argue against my own point here: The Predictable Revenue method leads to reps with conversation atrophy; but, on the flip side, Aaron prescribes that SDRs should do the initial discovery calls so they can separate the real leads from the tire kickers.
  
  
• Tying activities to results to create replicable sales models.
  

In summary, Predictable Revenue is one sales strategy you should study up on and know how to execute. It works for some companies based on what they sell, who they sell to, and their demand type. But it is not a one-size-fits-all, universal approach. Proceed with caution.

What do you think? Have you deployed Predictable Revenue with great success? Great failure? Tell your story in the comments below.

This Is What Happens When You Don't Capture Sales Call Data

Today’s post is by Eric Esfahanian, chief revenue officer of Gryphon Networks.

 

 

Nowadays, a lack of meaningful visibility into reps’ daily phone calls is a plague affecting sales managers leading teams of all sizes.

According to research conducted by The Brevet Group, only 33 percent of organizations say their sales goals were met in the past two years. However, the research also found that the majority of relevant sales interactions still happen over the phone.

With that in mind, it’s clear the telephone is the richest source of intelligence into the behaviors of your reps and customers. And, if you can’t capture, measure, or manage data related to daily sales calls, you’re potentially missing major insights that could be leveraged to earn you thousands or even millions more in revenue.

This visibility gap between a rep’s call activities and revenue is due to a lack of ability to capture sales call data and rapidly interpret it in a targeted, contextual way. HubSpot reports 40 percent of sales teams are still using manual spreadsheets to track sales-activity data, and almost 30 percent of salespeople report spending more than an hour each day on data entry.

No wonder sales managers still tend to rely on old-fashioned gut instincts, hunches, and historic trends to inform their decision making.

Here’s the thing: Technology can now automate sales activity data into easy-to-understand, actionable insights. So why aren’t more managers using such solutions to guide and drive standards to improve performance?

Companies tend to forget that the sales call data produced by reps is company property. You’re either using it or wasting it. As Forbes has reported, 62 percent of CRM is estimated to become cloud-based by 2018. This means now is the perfect time for sales leaders to look to the cloud for device-agnostic telephony that simplifies, standardizes, and automates your capture of phone-based activity from your sales force – whether captive or independent.

Overlooking sales call data is like a farmer playing Fortnite for 11 months out of the year instead of nurturing and cultivating their crops to maximize output come harvest time in October. As crazy as that may sound, managers do it every day when they rely on pipeline management instead of measuring and optimizing daily sales call data.

Remember: If you can’t accurately measure your sales activity, you can’t interpret or improve it. And that’s kind of the purpose of a manager, after all.

How to Get Meetings with CEOs

Today’s post is by Matt Conway, an advisor, executive coach and speaker on go-to-market strategy and sales acceleration. Clients who work with him say they dramatically accelerate their time-to-market, revenue, and sales cycles; and improve their win rates.

 

In today’s hyper-competitive market, what are your new business sales hunters doing differently to accelerate your sales cycle and improve your win rates?

If they’re anything like the growth leaders I work with, they’re making sure their salespeople are prospecting to and speaking with the person who can say yes to what you sell – the ultimate decision maker: the CEO or their designated senior executive.

Most salespeople claim they’re proficient at getting meetings with C-level executives. If I had a dollar for every CV I’ve read that makes this claim…

If that were true, CEOs and other senior executives would do nothing but be in meetings with salespeople. Clearly, this isn’t the case.

So, for those sales leaders who focus their team on getting meetings and having conversations at the highest level, there is an opportunity for significant competitive advantage.

And, if most sales leaders were being candid, they’d admit they’re probably not proficient at getting meetings at this level either – and that’s why most of their salespeople spend their time prospecting to mid-level executives, because they model what their leaders know, do, and expect.

Getting meetings with C-level execs or their senior designate isn’t hard. In fact, it’s often much, much quicker to get an appointment with (or referral from) the CEO than getting a meeting with a mid-ranking exec who is vested in the status quo. This applies in all B2B sales – even if the CEO isn’t the main buyer for the product, service, or solution you sell.

It just takes a mindset tweak and some new skills. Even first-time salespeople can get amazing results very quickly when they know how.

“My first CEO response was under one minute after sending my message!” Nate, Sales Development Representative

“My Senior Enterprise Director has been trying to get into this account for years. I just got a meeting with the VP Operations in six minutes.” Cody, Business Development Associate

So can more experienced sales reps.

“I secured a meeting with a hard-to-reach CEO in 26 minutes and had a meaningful pitch to another client I was trying to engage for 18 months!” Kevin, Sr. Manager, Business Development

“I spent two years with one of my prospects without any response using the old mindset of approaching mid-level managers. After the session, the result was amazing: CEO meeting in nine hours after one email with no follow-up.” Samer, Client Partner

There are three things you can do so your new business sales team gets results like these.

#1: Make sure your value proposition focuses on the outcomes and impact your client can expect – and that other clients get – because of working with you. Rather than saying, “We help companies to…” (which is how most value props start, and why they sound the same) demonstrate immediate credibility and social proof by saying, “Clients like ABC and XYZ say they get (results/outcome/impact) because they choose to work with [name of your company].” “Choose to work with [name of your company]” is actually an embedded suggestion that pre-conditions your potential customer to choose to work with you.

#2: Go high! Once your messaging is more client focused, just switching your attention on getting meetings with more senior executives will mean you get meetings with more senior executives – as senior executives are always on the lookout for new initiatives that will accelerate time to market, increase revenue, decrease costs, improve efficiencies, and more. They’re wired that way. And research shows they appreciate salespeople who bring new ideas to them.

#3: Teach your salespeople to write well or share messages that work. Ask your sales team to send you the prospecting emails/letters that generate the most meetings for them. Tweak them to appeal to senior execs’ motivations and share the best ones with everyone so they’re not reinventing the wheel every day (otherwise, you’re paying your expensive salespeople to be copywriters).

Doing these three things has helped new business salespeople increase the number of appointments they get by 23-53 percent. Even more importantly, appointment to opportunity conversion improves by as much as 94 percent and pipeline increases by as much as 166 percent. And, because these are conversations with true decision makers, salespeople sell more in less time.

If you want to cut through the clutter and fill your sales pipeline with quality opportunities, you must approach prospecting differently than you may be doing today. In the words of Mark Twain: “Whenever you find that you’re on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”

And, if you want to accelerate the process, contact me at [email protected] or 647/402-2096. I’ll be happy to share some additional ideas and insights.

How to Drive Success During Your First 90 Days as a Sales Enablement Leader

Today’s post is by Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, LLC.

 

 

You’ve been hired as (or promoted to be) a sales enablement leader. Now what do you do? Where do you focus? How do you evaluate your team – or build a new one? Every company wants a world-class program, but what does world-class sales enablement look like?  

How many times have you been asked this question? My best advice is to let your customers (sales leadership) answer it for you. This will give you an opportunity to build a group of champions on your behalf while showing them that your organization would never build what you “think the sales organization needs,” – instead, building a long-standing, mutually equitable relationship that impacts the maturation, growth, and success of the company!

As you move into this role, you must adopt a well-structured approach to gathering and analyzing information about the function’s responsibilities and priorities. First, you need to evaluate your current environment.

As a new sales enablement leader, you’ll need to quickly develop an understanding of the organization’s current enablement resources, processes, tools, and priorities. Meet with as many of your internal customers (sales, marketing, sales ops, product marketing, competitive, HR, etc.) as possible to help you form a well-rounded opinion about the maturity and value of your current organization. They will also help you focus on their priorities and needs. Because enablement is an evolving function, do not make any changes within your first 60 days!

Listen, Learn, Lead

As you meet with your senior sales leaders, ask them the following ten questions:

1. What is your definition of sales enablement?
   
   
2. If you had a blank canvas, what would you see as your team’s top three to five priorities for this quarter and fiscal year?
   
   
3. What is your definition of success – beyond just “hitting the number”?
   
   
4. How long is it currently taking to successfully onboard a new sales professional?
   
   
5. How are you currently tracking and reporting on the components of their   onboarding experience?
   
   
6. What type of feedback are you receiving about their onboarding experience?
   
   
7. Who are your most successful frontline managers and sales professionals, so I can get their input and feedback?
   
   
8. What if I could create a way to scale your top performers and drive more incremental revenue at a faster rate?
   
   
9. What are you willing to commit to in order to ensure the success of your frontline managers and their direct reports?
   
   
10. How soon can we meet again so I can share the results with you?

It’s critical that you get a deep understanding of the nuances of their business, leaders, and teams, as well as position yourself as a valued partner.

Next, you need to develop a strategy. As a new sales enablement leader, you’ll want to develop an in-depth evaluation of assets that will be used to determine which will require further optimization.

This evaluation should drive the creation and communication of your 100-day SWOT analysis. While continuing to deliver existing enablement programs, you must select new strategic initiatives that can improve the effectiveness of sales in the near term. Based on the list of potential new activities, process changes, and technology improvements identified in the previous steps, identify and build consensus around priorities – then begin implementing.

Remember, as a new leader you can do anything you want – you just can’t accomplish everything within the first 90 days. Especially if hope is your only strategy.

Learn more about how I can help you with sales enablement strategies by watching the video below.

The Type of Salespeople Who Drive Me Crazy

Today’s post is by Dave Kurlan – a 2012 inductee into the Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame, a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, and sales development expert. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group (named the Top Sales Assessment Tool for seven consecutive years) and Kurlan & Associates (a global sales consulting firm). He has written two books, including the bestseller Baseline Selling, and his blog, Understanding the Sales Force, was named the Top Sales & Marketing Blog for six consecutive years.

 

A lot of things drive me crazy.

For instance, I can’t stand it when I choose the express lane for 10 items or less and that lane always has the s-l-o-w-e-s-t cashier.

I can’t stand it when I unsubscribe to junk email but the unsubscribe doesn’t take and the junk keeps coming in.

I can’t stand it when drivers cut in front of me and then drive too slowly.

I can’t stand it when I receive awful emails from marketers selling things I don’t need, who continue to send follow-up emails every few days.

And then there are the lousy salespeople. The weakest salespeople are so bad it’s a stretch to call them “salespeople” – although that is the role they are in and they are responsible for generating revenue.

I often write about the sales core competencies in which the best salespeople excel. Now let’s look at the sales core competencies in which the weakest salespeople are the worst.

Compare the percentage of salespeople who are strong in each competency for both the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent in all 21 sales core competencies.

Category	Competency	% Strong Top 10%	% Strong Bottom 10%
Will to Sell	Commitment	91	63
Will to Sell	Desire	97	20
Will to Sell	Outlook	81	50
Will to Sell	Motivation	100	59
Will to Sell	Responsibility	66	34
Sales DNA	Doesn’t Need to Be Liked	76	9
Sales DNA	Controls Emotions	63	10
Sales DNA	Supportive Buy Cycle	61	4
Sales DNA	Comfortable Discussing Money	87	4
Sales DNA	Supportive Beliefs	52	0
Sales DNA	Rejection Proof	97	55
Tactical	Hunter	96	18
Tactical	Consultative Seller	55	0
Tactical	Value Seller	93	1
Tactical	Qualifier	85	1
Tactical	Presentation Approach	92	31
Tactical	Relationship Builder	63	36
Tactical	Closer	20	0
Tactical	Sales Process	80	7
Tactical	CRM Savvy	81	13
Tactical	Mastery of Social Selling	41	4

It doesn’t take much math to determine that the score of the top 10 percent is 375 percent higher than the score of the bottom 10 percent.

The five biggest gaps are in the competencies:

1. Value Seller, with a gap of 92 points
2. Qualifier, with a gap of 84 points
3. Comfortable Discussing Money, with a gap of 83 points
4. Hunter Competency, with a gap of 78 points
5. Desire for Success in Sales, with a gap of 77 points

The weakest salespeople lack the Desire to succeed and, as a result, fail to fill their pipelines. The few opportunities that do get into their pipelines fail to close because these salespeople are unable to talk about money, can’t sell value, and don’t qualify.

We can also see that, in addition to the competencies with the five biggest gaps, NONE of the weakest salespeople have the following three competencies as strengths:

• Closer
• Consultative Seller
• Supportive Beliefs

And there are three more competencies where less than 10 percent of these weak salespeople have the competencies as strengths:

• Sales Process
• Closer
• Social Selling

Did you notice the one competency that sticks out like a sore thumb? Only 20 percent of the STRONG salespeople have the Closer Competency as a strength. Are you wondering why? They are so good at Hunting, Selling Consultatively, Selling Value, and Qualifying that they don’t need to be any good at Closing. For these top salespeople, closing is simply a natural conclusion of their sales process.

Those are the types of salespeople who don’t drive me (or their buyers) crazy.

Five Ways Data-driven Sales Is Evolving and How to Keep Up

Today ’s post is by Limor Wainstein, a technical writer and editor at Agile SEO, a boutique digital marketing agency focused on technology and SaaS markets. She has over 10 years’ experience writing technical articles and documentation for various audiences, including technical on-site content, software documentation, and dev guides. She specializes in big data analytics, computer/network security, middleware, software development, and APIs.

 

Although sales forecasts, email open rates, profit margins, and IP resolution data are all part of the sales numbers game, they’re single data points that give only a sliver of information. Data-driven sales has evolved to include a much more integrative look at the components that tell a sales story – from both a detailed and whole-picture view.

With the right data serving as the foundation of sales enablement, organizations can determine which content, tools, and techniques will best serve their sales team – from lead gathering and initial contact to closing deals and cross-selling.

Here are some of the most innovative ways organizations are evolving in their use of data-driven sales.

#1: Choosing data insights that feed sales enablement

Although basic data collection will always be important, it provides only the bare bones of value to an organization’s sales team. Social media analytics may help you determine what prospects are saying about your brand, but which industry influencers are affecting these opinions? Knowing who’s visiting your Website is good, but understanding if and why they have the potential to become star customers is better. Likewise, knowing which sales reps have the best closing rates is crucial, but knowing where the other sales reps are losing prospects in the sales funnel is even more helpful.

Don’t know what you don’t know? Check out this list of 14 data analytics from Boundless Markets that could provide insight to your sales enablement.

#2: Shifting how organizations use data

Where once top companies used data analytics to simply collect information and maybe apply it to production, now it’s being used to provide both insight and strategy.

IBM’s blog breaks this down to an evolution from “data-guided” to “data-savvy” – and, finally, “data-driven.” The first transition (from “data-guided” to “data-savvy”) often occurs after the organization has tried a variety of tools and vendors and finally realizes they’ve been spending money but not making tons of progress with the use of their data.

The “data-savvy” phase provides great insights into failures and successes, but the shift to being a “data-driven” company happens only when the organization is ready to use the information to create strategy. Sales enablement is fully supported.

#3: Improving sales enablement tools

Arming sales reps with state-of-the-art sales enablement tools may initially lead organizations to assume they’ll be looking at budget-busting technologies. But the truth is two-fold: Some of the best sales enablement solutions aren’t that expensive – and, when implemented properly, they’ll quickly pay for themselves.

Here’s a small sampling of sales enablement tools that can help take the guesswork out of what data to farm, what it means, and what to do with it:

• Crazy Egg uses heatmap technology that tells you where users came from, what they want, and how they behave on your site – including how far they scroll.
• IdeaScale puts the power of crowdsourcing to work via feedback and solution-based ideas. Among other features, organizations can customize imagery, language, and architecture for specific communities, and organize customer lifecycles into activities and goals.
• Pipeliner gives organizations a visual of their sales teams in real time to provide insight from five views: ranked, weighted, unweighted, balanced, and real.
• Hoopla uses video, data analytics, and game mechanics to turn sales goals into contests. Organizations can motivate sales reps with leaderboards, track sales, and show milestone completions in real time.

#4: Incorporating predictive intelligence

In the past, organizations had to rely on educated guesses, hunches, or general data to predict which products or services prospects would buy, how much they’d buy, and when. The development of predictive intelligence technologies has changed the game for sales by prioritizing leads, helping marketing teams create and deliver relevant ads at each stage of the buying cycle, and producing account-based campaigns aimed at specific targets.

With tools like predictive scoring, organizations can use data science to identify potential customers. Marketing teams can make real-time adjustments to their campaigns and pick the best leads for their sales team.

#5: Onboarding and training new employees

Keeping up with the evolution of data-driven sales goes beyond just sales engagement programs that help prospects and customers.

Organizations can upgrade to intranet software that helps sales reps engage and collaborate with their team members, share content and training materials for new reps who are onboarding or continuing sales training, and track progress.

These pieces need to be integrative (e.g., with customer relationship management), adaptive (e.g., with mobile and tablet capabilities for sales reps who travel), and multisensory (e.g., video, documents, audio) to be most effective.

If your organization is looking to master the way it uses data to improve sales, it may be time to change things up. These tools and approaches can escort you into the future of data-driven sales success.

How to Hire a Sales Proposal Writer to Win More Deals

Today’s post is by Jeff Weil, general manager of Upland Qvidian.

 

 

We just turned the corner on graduation season, and hiring managers are hard at work trying to draw the newest crop of talent to their organizations. While companies are trying to fill plenty of entry-level sales and marketing roles, there is one underrated job they should emphasize: the sales proposal writer.

Any business with a sales or marketing team should hire a dedicated sales proposal writer to help assist with the proposal process and enable the team to win more deals. However, some companies choose not to hire a dedicated resource – preferring to delegate the work of proposal writing to various subject matter experts within their organizations, who frankly often don’t have the time to develop the content needed for a compelling request for proposal (RFP) response.

A sales proposal writer will help manage content creation and ensure the company’s brand is consistent throughout every submitted proposal – a key detail that can often be overlooked when sourcing input from a variety of internal experts.

For companies that don’t have a sales proposal writer, fear not: The talent pool is vast – especially now that school is officially out. But, with so many candidates to choose from, how can companies narrow down their selection to find the ideal prospect?

The Traits of the Best Sales Proposal Writers

While the exact role of the sales proposal writer will vary depending on the industry in which they operate, how their sales team is structured, etc., there are certain traits every business can look out for when hiring for the role.

Aside from the obvious ones of being a skilled writer and exceptional communicator, the best proposal writers are also:

• Self-starters – Finding a candidate who has an entrepreneurial spirit is key, as proposal writers often must teach themselves new topics, operate independently, and manage time efficiently. While they’ll be core members of the larger sales team, proposal writers will spend much of their time on their own – creating or editing content for very specific topics. The ability to master those topics without leaning on anyone else is a huge asset, and one that hiring managers should be on the lookout for.
  
  
• Creative – While they may not be crafting fictional stories, proposal writers still need to figure out a way to add spark to each proposal a company develops. Businesses should look for individuals with a strong sense of creativity who can think outside the box to make each content asset unique – helping the proposal stand out amongst competitors.
  
  
• Detail-oriented – This is a particularly crucial trait for businesses operating in highly regulated industries and handling mission-critical data that may be leveraged in the sales process. Even with a software tool that can assist with content governance, audit trails, and compliance, businesses need an internal resource with a detail-oriented eye to ensure that both the best and most accurate content is being used.

Marketing the Sales Proposal Writer Role

Plenty of new graduates are seeking proposal writing as their entry-level gig, but there are also those who – despite having the ideal traits – may not be considering proposal writing as their career starter. If a company runs into the issue of finding their perfect candidate who has never heard of proposal writing before, here’s how they can position it as a “dream job”:

• Proposal writers quickly become company and industry experts – a trait that can translate to success throughout their careers
  
  
• Proposal writers’ work has a significant and measurable impact on a company’s bottom line (something not many entry-level roles can claim)
  
  
• Proposal writers have access to senior management and internal experts – offering an extensive resource pool of expertise

There is monumental value in having a sales proposal writer on the team – particularly in ensuring more business wins. Companies that aren’t hiring one (or aren’t having luck doing so) need to apply these lessons to rethink their strategies before the best candidates are gone.