or products A discussion of key issues A description of the buyer's specifications and how they will be met The cost of the offering A schedule for delivery of the products or services Proof of prior experience i.e. Testimonials from previous customers, Descriptions of previous projects Managing business proposals Managing proposals presents an enormous challenge for sales and marketing teams. Many established management methods are ill-suited to deal with the broader issues associated with the production and delivery of proposals. In these cases, organizations often rely on outsourcing by identifying a proposal manager to support their proposal development needs. The process of proposal management Proposal management is an inherently collaborative process. It often consists of the following basic roles and responsibilities: Creator – responsible for creating and editing content. Editor – responsible for tuning the content message and the style of delivery, including translation and localization. Publisher – responsible for releasing the content for use. Administrator – responsible for managing access permissions to documents and files, usually accomplished by assigning access rights to user groups or roles. Consumer or viewer – the person who reads or otherwise takes in content after it is published or shared. Increasingly, the term proposal management is being used to suggest that engagement with the proposal process is important to more than just the sales team, and should also affect those working in marketing, legal, and sales. Some writers refer to key stages in the proposal management process using colour codes to denote milestone reviews, for example a black hat review. The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) refers to a black hat review as an independent review of the strategies and proposals likely to be put forward by competitors. According to Carl Dickson of the Capture Planning website, a black hat review should tell an organisation which competitors are strong in their own areas of weakness and which are weaker where they are strong, and is therefore also potentially used to determine whether partnering with one rival organisation might be a viable proposal. Other colours are used in relation to teams: a pre-writing strategy review is sometimes called a "Pink Team", a formal draft review may be called a "Red Team", and the term "Gold Team" indicates a final pre-submission review. Dickson notes that these terms are not consistently defined. Inherent to the process of managing proposal is the decision of whether to submit