Any advice for proposal people needing to get greater sponsorship from senior colleagues within the business?

The Proposal Guys posed this to Patricia Volmer, retired “Proposal Witch”, in an interview on their site. Patricia's response:

I firmly believe the only way to get greater sponsorship is to educate senior management. In our case, I gave a mini-presentation to people at various levels within the business - anyone who would be asked to contribute or whose buy-in we needed. During my presentation, I presented many of the points I picked up from BJ when I attended a conference which he presented. Many of the people to whom I presented commented that they had not previously understood the work involved to produce a proposal. They had a mentality of “it’s all done by elves and magic”. (BJ used this term during his presentation.) Sr. management needs to understand what it takes to develop, produce and submit high-quality proposals and not support the elves and magic mentality in order for the quality of proposals and the way in which they are produced to improve.

Click here to see the full interview. It is insightful.