Imagine seeing a $6,224 return for every $1 you spent on something per year. A pretty good investment, wouldn’t you say? Well, that’s exactly the return that one APMP corporate member saw for its investment in APMP in its latest fiscal year. Read on to learn how one team used their corporate membership to transform their team from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
A top-performing bid and proposal team can be the difference between surviving and thriving as an organization.
But getting a bid and proposal team to ‘top performing’ status is no small feat. The bid and proposal function is notoriously undervalued and underdeveloped by higher-level leadership. This often results in teams that are functional and have passable win rates, but that are operating far below their full potential.
Danelle Morrow isn’t one to settle for ‘functional’, and when she joined Sodexo as its VP of Proposals in North America, she immediately embarked on a mission to realize her department’s full potential.
“When I first joined, we were winning business and accomplishing some goals,” Morrow says. “But there was a lot of room for improvement, and my charge was to elevate the team to that next level of success from every angle.”
And that’s exactly what she did.
After just two years, Sodexo saw its highest win rate in company history, as well as huge boosts in revenue and customer satisfaction. Her secret? APMP corporate membership.
We spoke with Danelle Morrow and her team to find out exactly how they leveraged their membership with APMP to boost their outcomes.
Read on for six steps you can use to emulate their success.
1. Use APMP’s benchmarking data to advocate for your team
Morrow’s first step was to secure more investment from leadership into her team.
“We wanted to shift away from the perception that this function is a back-of-house administrative role and toward the truth that we are strategists driving growth and retention for the company,” she says.
But, in an organization with eight data-driven C-suites to persuade, she needed a convincing case to make the investment a no-brainer.
So, she used APMP’s Compensation Report and other APMP-backed research.
“I did an audit of the entire department – compensation, pay levels, and roles and responsibilities – and I benchmarked it against the Compensation Report,” Morrow tells me. “I found that there were individuals that were underpaid for market value, and used that as leverage to advocate for merit increases and promotions.”
And it worked. Over the past two years, the department has seen 20% of its staff promoted.
She adds: “The data supports investing in your team. When I look at the APMP and Loopio Trends and Benchmarks Report and the APMP and Responsive SRM Report, it’s clear that companies that invest more in the proposal team win more business.
“This charge requires influencing C-suites who are very analytical and numbers-driven, as you would expect at that level. APMP provides data points to collect and benchmark what we’re doing against what the top-performing teams are doing.”
Jackie Mastropolo, Sodexo’s Director of Bid Strategy and Development, adds: “To leadership, it’s just an opinion until you can show them the data – so having those resources to back you up comes in handy.”
2. Get your team APMP certified NOW
In the last two years, every member of the Sodexo team has achieved APMP certification, and pay increases and bonuses are awarded upon successful completion of certification.
“In my 20 years of experience, I’ve found that employees who have training and certification perform better, accelerate faster, and need less ramping and onboarding,” says Morrow. “The level of professionalism is simply elevated.”
Rita Pulliam, Senior Manager of Bid Strategy and Development at Sodexo, agrees.
“Having come into the team as a new manager, I can say that managing a team that is certified has been a really great experience,” Pulliam says. “I can really tell the difference between those that I’ve worked with that are not certified compared to those that are, because the ones that are certified are just heads and shoulders above the rest in their approach to completing proposal projects.”
As well as improving the team’s knowledge and skills, certification has a huge impact on the confidence and professionalism of individual team members.
RFP Strategist Jessica Jackson tells me that the department-wide support to achieve her APMP certification was invaluable to her.
“I had many years of proposal writing experience in nonprofit and grant proposals, but I was new to commercial proposals,” Jackson says. “Being able to get my APMP certification accelerated my comfort in this new profession, and any impostor syndrome that I had was quickly eradicated because APMP had prepared me.”
As well as getting their existing team certified, Sodexo made APMP certification a hiring standard.
Mastropolo believes that setting this standard for your organization is a “great way to source top talent”.
“There’s a level of candidate that has that credential,” she says. “We’re very fortunate to have a corporate membership to APMP, and to have leadership that is very dedicated to the APMP model. Not everybody is in that same situation, and a lot of proposal teams are teams of one. It’s so impressive when you come across a candidate who has taken it upon themselves to seek out APMP membership and credentials.”
Most recently, the team has successfully completed its mission to have all members complete the APMP Executive Summaries Micro-certification.
3. Celebrate your people
Beyond simply supporting its people through certification, the Sodexo team puts a lot of emphasis on celebrating those achievements.
“Oftentimes, in this profession, you can be the unsung hero – when you do a great job, it’s quiet; but the second you slip up, it suddenly gets noisy,” Morrow says. “[Putting team members through certification] gives us opportunities to provide validation, appreciation and recognition.”
During this period that the team has been working through the APMP Micro-certifications, Morrow tells us that the team has made a point of shouting out newly-certified colleagues in internal messaging.
“It helps a lot with employee retention and morale by helping people feel good, be seen and appreciated,” she adds.
4. Make use of APMP’s professional development content
As well as certification-driven training, the team also make very deliberate use of APMP’s stream of professional development content.
“Proposal professionals are busy people, and so having insightful content in digestible chunks really sparks innovation,” says Mastropolo. “I’ve sat in on APMP’s Power Half-Hours that have led to whole initiatives within the department.”
(You can watch and listen to four seasons of APMP’s Power Half-Hours right now on APMP-TV at www.apmp.org.)
Whitley Warbel, an RFP Strategist, echoes her colleague’s praise for APMP’s Power-Half Hours, stating: “You don’t have to set aside two-hour chunks of time. The Power Half-Hours are much easier to get through.”
Morrow adds that this content can also aid in influencing upper leadership.
“You can reference a webinar you saw and say, ‘This is how the trendsetters are doing it, and we need to follow suit,’” she says. “So, from that perspective, it’s just even more data to collect and benchmark against.”
At Sodexo, professional development is supported by leadership, and gaining CEUs is integrated into the team’s professional development objectives.
Warbel says that having CEU goals to strive for makes the team “very united”, and gives them “so much knowledge that we can bring back to our processes” at the same time.
“We have a Teams channel where we can share when we’ve particularly benefited from a webinar,” says Jackson. “I sometimes schedule watch parties for webinars so that the team can have a chat going while we’re watching.”
APMP’s professional development content can also help members of your team who have taken on voluntary specialist roles within your processes.
As well as being a senior manager, Rita Pulliam is also the AI champion for the department.
“I’ve been able to go and watch webinars on AI and do some research on companies that are offering AI tools, and it’s been very beneficial in helping me determine how AI can work best in our department,” she tells me.
5. Support your team to become thought leaders
Beyond just consuming the professional development content offered by APMP, the Sodexo team has encouraged its people to speak at events and take the lead on offering thought leadership to the profession as a whole.
“It’s a great outlet for leadership,” says Morrow, who has herself spoken at BPC events. “We’ve got a lot of high-potential employees here that are on a trajectory of advancement.”
Morrow gives us examples of two team members, Lee Robinson and Patrick Chase, who have recently presenting webinars on APMP TV about scaling for impact and leading multi-generational teams respectively.
“It’s a great way for them to flex those leadership muscles and really refine that skillset in a supportive and encouraging environment,” she adds.
6. Integrate APMP best practices in the day-to-day
APMP’s Body of Knowledge is an encyclopedia of bid and proposal best practices and the Sodexo team employs those best practices throughout their day-to-day processes to boost their efficiency, effectiveness, and credibility in their organization and beyond.
“The principles of APMP are woven throughout all of our processes and training,” Mastropolo says. “It really adds a level of credibility.”
Pulliam tells us the best practices are also helpful for ensuring that realistic expectations for tasks and deadlines are set.
“If I’m dealing with a salesperson who is expecting a very quick turnaround on a bid, I can point to APMP’s best practices for creating a top-level bid and show them true information that justifies why we need a certain timeframe to complete a project,” she says.
It worked for Sodexo, and it can work for you too!
“The results speak for themselves,” Morrow says. “After the past two years, we’ve had our highest win rate in company history; we’ve won more mega deals than we have in any prior sales year; and our customer satisfaction scores have increased by 50%, indicating that our business partners are having a more positive experience in working with us too. The numbers moved along with the story.”
Morrow crunched some of those numbers for me following the close of Sodexo’s fiscal year on August 31. She discovered that, in the first year of their corporate membership, every $1 dollar spent on APMP yielded $6,224 in return!
If the lucrative journey of Danelle Morrow and the rest of her incredible team at Sodexo has inspired you to follow in their footsteps, why not find out more about how a corporate membership could help you scale up your success.
Have you used APMP’s resources and offerings to generate success for your organization? We’d love to share your story! Email erin.smith@apmp.org to be the next case study featured.
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