My Clients

Ask me what I do.
Ok, so what do you do?
I'm a marketer.
That's vague. What do you really do?
I write proposals.
What kind of proposals?
I work for an engineering firm. If you need environmental, transportation or building infrastructure services, I can write you a proposal.
Oh, so, who are your clients?
Local, state and federal agencies are our clients, well, thats not altogether true either.
Then who are your clients?
My clients are the engineers at my company.

Marketer sounds sexier than proposal writer. I work in a marketing department, but my job is sales. Daily, I work with principals, project managers, and project engineers. They are the clients.

My job is to develop a working relationship with my clients. If I am successful, the proposals I write are tighter and focused on the project, external client, and users. Developing this relationship leads to better proposals. If I develop a rapport with my internal client, then I transcend the proposal and become an influencer on my client and the proposal's direction.

How do I [you] do this? Simple. Interest in the product as well as its owners and users, and if not that, then interest in the client. Bridges are cool, rails-to-trails are cool, even some of the wastewater treatment processes are cool. Engineers design cool things. I invest my time in them to get their geek into my proposals.

One question: why do you do this? If they go on and on, then they had me at hello.