Susanne Barsoum
Tech Writer ✍🏼|BD Director 🏆|MENA🧿|Proposal Czar ♛
Meet the Consultant
About Susanne
Short Bio
After a career as a BD Director at Chemonics International I'm building Keylime to make business development more fruitful for everyone.
I love business development and have worked on hundreds of proposals with a strong win rate. My experience, networks and expertise are primarily in the Middle East, but I have also worked and lived in Nigeria, Haiti, and done assignments globally.
How I can add value: lead proposal teams from early strategy to win, write technical approaches, review proposals, advise teams on how to improve win rate.
At Keylime I'm focused on building a network, system, and service that will enable industry professionals to use their precious time to do what they do best: international development work. Get to work faster with Keylime.
Technical Expertise
Agriculture and Food Security
Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance
Economic Growth and Trade
Education
Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment
Water and Sanitation
Working in Crises and Conflict
Donor Expertise
USAID
USAID/OTI
US Department of State
FCDO
Regional Expertise
Africa
Latin America and the Caribbean
Middle East and North Africa
Roles & Skills
Roles
Technical Writer
Proposal Reviewer
Proposal Lead
Other Section Writer
Skills
Writing
Proposal Strategy
Capture strategy
leadership
managing teams
quality control
Experience
01/21/2018 - Now
Founder and CEO
Keylime
Short Description
Building a marketplace for international development.
Support more than 40 organizations to work with Keylime consultants on our marketplace. Facilitate opportunities for hundreds of consultants on Keylime everyday.
In addition to building and managing Keylime I continue to work on proposals. I support clients with proposal reviews, technical writing, and strategy. I design and deliver specialized new business trainings to industry organizations.
Proposals/Projects
West Bank/Gaza Global Competencies Technical Writer
Egypt Value Added Agriculture Technical writer
05/25/2005 - 01/15/2018
Director of Business Development
Chemonics International
Short Description
Working with a division of 40-60 staff I oversaw the strategy, resource management, and proposal development for the Middle East region. We produced an average of $700M in proposals each year with an average win rate of 40 percent.
Proposals/Projects
Jordan CITIES-Czar🏆
Syria Regional Program-Czar🏆
DFID Syria Education Program-Czar 🏆
Egypt SEED Czar
DFID Education Program-Technical Writer 🏆
Syria Regional Program II-Reviewer and Oral Presentation Coach 🏆
Jamaica Community Policing-Technical Writer
Afghanistan ISLA-Czar
Afghanistan TAFA-Czar 🏆
+ Red team or final review of just about every USAID proposal in the Middle East 2011-2018!
Q/A
What are you known for?
Getting excited about proposals, strong networks in Jordan and Egypt, love of proposal writing and czar, mentoring BD talent, always trying to find better ways to do our work.
What are you looking for in an assignment?
Most of my time is focused on building Keylime, but I do love proposal work so I try to make time for 1-2 major proposal roles a year. For those roles, I want to focus on assignments that I can add significant value either because of my knowledge and experience or because of the strategic position of the team. In general those will be czar and writing roles in the Middle East, with a focus on entrepreneurship or agriculture.
Your favorite productivity hack?
A tie: using a bullet journal and using Trello.They are both simple tools, but the bullet journal is in the world of atoms (offline) and Trello is in the world of bytes (online). The bullet journal is for me and keeps track of personal and professional goals and I use Trello for team collaboration.