The other weekend, I took my son to visit HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship. The tour was quite amazing - up and down decks, as we explored every nook and cranny of the legendary ship.Now, I wonder: what if we thought of the reader of a proposal as a ‘visitor’, on a ‘guided tour’ of the solution?

They’d have to be welcomed professionally. They’d want to assimilate the basics quickly (where are we going to go, what will we get to see, how long will it last?). They’d expect their host to be well-informed: to present clearly, to use language and concepts appropriate for the whole in the party - not too advanced for the younger kids on the tour, not too simple to patronise or bore the adults.

They’d have questions of their own, of course, although they would be amazed at quite how well the guide covered all of the information that they wanted to hear. There’d be high-quality supporting materials - a booklet here, a fact sheet there - for those who wanted to learn more.

They’d end the trip feeling as though they had been made welcome, valued, respected. They’d have taken away some fascinating new knowledge. They’d recommend the experience to their friends.

I could have fun with this. At the highest level, getting a team working on an opportunity to think about the experience that they wanted the visitors to enjoy might unlock some cool, shared thoughts on the characteristics of the successful proposal. And I could see this adding an interesting, unusual perspective to the content design process. I like the idea of drawing a plan on the wall of the proposal war room - the layout of an old house, for example. The team could label each room with different sections of the proposal; they could debate where the tourists would go first, and think about how to make the experience work best for all who approach the front door.

I came across these two tidbits in my local paper -

“Time Out Of The House Significantly Contributes To Children’s Health.” This article stressed the need for children to get away from the TV and computer and spend time outside. The article then has, “You and your children can find a list of outdoor activities online at www.outdoorfun.com.

Decidedly mixed message there. And you just know most of us (Ok, those of us that have been in the game awhile) have submitted a document that contained some similarly contradictory/conflicting statements. Thus the need for careful and critical reviews, ideally by a person or persons with some objectivity (and who aren’t afraid to be critical.)

In the second piece the author spoke of being behind a truck for ABC (name changed) Corporate Coffee Services. The author pointed out that he was behind the truck in a drive-through line at a Dunkin Donuts. Hmm. Now doesn’t that deliver the right message?

Here too, I suspect how the company operates and appears to the customer may differ, either slightly or significantly, to how it is presented within a proposal.

One of those frustrating bids recently. We forewarned the team; warmed them up with some background briefing information; gathered a core team to think through our likely strategy and story; pulled together as much relevant raw material as we could; built a plan (mindful that timescales were still not 100% clear).

The contributors were… well, if not raring to go, at least aware that the proposal was coming up, clear on their likely roles, and starting to juggle their other commitments accordingly.

And then the customer’s RFP was delayed. And delayed. And delayed again.

Even with well-qualified deals, sometimes pre-proposal planning efforts can turn into something a “cry wolf” scenario. It’s an interesting dilemma; as I wrote to this particular team, informing them of the latest delay:

As always, there’s a fine line with bids between:

(a) giving the team as much notice as possible - with the risk that timescales may slip, and

(b) waiting until the dates are definite but then giving you too little notice!

Sorry if the moving target here is proving confusing, but I’d still rather forewarn you as best I can rather than springing things on you last minute…

Certainly my experience is that content contributors value early engagement over and above the occasional unexpected delay. It’s always easier for them to re-allocate any time they’ve set aside, back to their day jobs, than it is to try and carve out time for proposal work from an already-packed schedule.

While driving the other day my wife and I were discussing the first music either of us had purchased. As is usually the case for us, we had music playing (for those interested in such things, the song on at the moment was Eric Clapton’s version of Crossroads.)I fondly recalled the first album I ever purchased, at the ripe old age of 11. It was Gary Lewis’ This Diamond Ring. (Those who are old enough to remember this tune, definitely before Jon’s time, may well recall the song, and the lyrics might come easily to mind. In my case, they didn’t, which, as those who know me will tell you, is VERY unusual for me.

Now, sometimes having music on while trying to recall another song can be helpful. Other times, the music playing can be extremely distracting. That was the case while I listened to Eric Clapton play the blues and tried to recall the words to this 60’s pop tune.

So I tried an experiment.. I decided to leave the music playing and see if I could recall the lyrics, which I once knew well and which I was sure were in my memory banks somewhere. I tried for the several minutes of the Clapton tune to recall the lyrics without success. Then, as soon as the song stopped, the lyrics almost immediately came to mind.

I think this is something that happens within proposals. There’s a tendency to want to present multiple and often somewhat disconnected messages and/or themes and more rather than less information.

All of this vies for the reader’s attention and makes it difficult, perhaps impossible to discern a clear message and theme (the melody), let alone remember it (the lyrics) after the review has been completed.

Sticking to one tune and keeping things simple is definitely the way to go.

I mentioned earlier in the year that there’s some interesting academic research on the correlation between the order in which candidates appear in a contest, and the likely result. I’m not sure whether it applies directly to the world of bids and proposals, but it’s certainly given me some food for thought.

Wändi Bruine de Bruin of Carnegie Mellon University has written a couple of papers now on the theme “Save the last dance for me”. She’s studied the outcomes of figure skating competitions, the Eurovision Song Contest (!) and reviewed other research into contests as varied as gymnastics, classical music and synchronized swimming.

The results aren’t entirely clear cut, but some strong patterns do emerge which tend to back up our “last or first” philosophy.

Broadly speaking, if candidates are judged via a step-by-step approach – that is, each individual entrant is scored and discussed immediately after they’ve taken their turn – then the data suggests that it’s better to go last:

contestants who performed later in the sequence generally received better scores.

Judges compare each performance to its predecessors and “tend to overweigh the unique features of each new, focal, performance.” However, if an ‘end-of-sequence’ procedure is used, where “judges do not announce their scores until all contestants have performed”:

one may expect judges to give higher scores to contestants that are remembered better. Research on free recall suggests that first and last appearing options are more likely to be remembered.

Fascinating stuff: I’d love to see some research into bid presentations. Then again, proper planning, an effective content design process for the presentation, development of great collateral, a properly-managed rehearsal and careful choreography of the logistics all probably play a bigger part in improving your chances of success than the order in which you happen to present!

Either “Run the other Way!” or “Watch and Learn”

Connie Sanford is well known and respected within the proposal community and has presented at many APMP conferences and Pragmatech User Forums. She told us she was enjoying the questions so much that she answered 7 of them instead of the usual 5. Here’s Connie input:

Please describe your current role?

I am the Manager of Proposal Services for Kforce Professional Staffing. I manage a team of 4 - 3 full time proposal writers and a developer for our automated documents. Annually, we review about 350 RFPs and were instrumental in adding $44 million in new revenue to the Firm last year. We support a field sales force of approximately 1,500. We also have 30+ automated documents for the field to use for smaller opportunities. They used the website to create more than 1,000 proposals in 2007.

How did you first get involved in sales proposals?

I finished my BA at the ripe age of 39 and took a job as a technical writer, which was really an RFP responder - I hesitate to call it a proposal writer because they only expected me to answer questionnaires (insurance company). I was a one-man show and had no idea what I was doing, but knew there had to be more than this. I looked around on the web and found APMP and they were just about to have their Salt Lake City convention. I asked to go and my boss approved it. I was intrigued by the presentation you guys (BJ and Jon) did and felt like I’d finally found a family of people who were like me. I learned about software like Pragmatech that could make my life and our company’s responses better. I became a proposal evangelist at that conference and haven’t stopped seeking better, building better and wanting more.

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

My advice would be to learn to speak their language. We are ‘word’ people - all of us think and speak and even dream in full sentences. Personally, I find it difficult to text because I can’t bring myself to leave out the punctuation or misspell the words. Your executives are probably not ‘word’ people; they are number people, statistics, ratios, win rates and return on investment. You must speak to them in those terms and make them understand that your department doesn’t just ‘do proposals.’ Your department reviews (for instance) 5 RFPs per person per week, resulting in 35% win rate. Each proposal takes about 20 hours and results in $500,000 in new business. That way they can begin to quantify your value to the Firm and justify your headcount, growth, your need to spend money to send the team to conferences, training sessions, pay for certification tests or anything else. It is our responsibility first to learn to speak to them before they learn to understand us.

Every proposal professional has a favourite horror story of the proposal that nearly (or actually) went wrong. What’s yours?

We did a proposal for a State a couple of years ago. We had just acquired a new company who was already doing business with the State, but the State wanted Kforce to win the bid not just sign over the old award. It was complicated and a large document with multiple copies but after weeks working with the folks from the new company and our organization, we got the document submitted. The State called us to say our headers were wrong. They had not mentioned the header requirement in the RFP, but we would need to reprint the proposals and send them in again. We completed and delivered the new documents only to receive a call from the State that they had posted an updated RFP on their website while we were working on the second version. We would have to comply with the new RFP and its format changes, language changes etc., which meant we had to review the old and new RFPs page at a time to catch all the changes. We submitted the third versions and then heard that our contact person had retired and we would be assigned a new reviewer, which would add months to the review cycle. It all worked out … we were awarded the business, but the entire process took 18 months. Our RFPs are usually released, responded and awarded within three months.

What one piece of advice would you offer to a newcomer just starting work on proposals?

I was reading these questions aloud to my team as I was contemplating which ones to answer. They all responded, in unison, “Run, run the other way.” That has to tell you something. Now, you have to understand, my team is the best - lots of experience, iron wills, strong backbones to deal with our constituency and loads of heart. Each is doing this because they want to. This is not an easy road. There’s no book to read, no degree to seek, finally we have some certification, but still each industry is so different, each of us has to be prepared to forge our own path. It’s not for the faint of heart. So, if the newcomer doesn’t heed, “Run!” I would have to say, “Watch and learn, don’t be afraid to ask and don’t be afraid to stand up when you know you are right.”

How did you come by your belief in the importance of proposals?

Many years ago I had occasion to request other vendors’ proposals through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) on a couple of municipalities. Even though the opportunities were for very different services, many of the vendors’ proposals were identical - word for word. Either the documents were wrong (in a couple of spots) or they were so vague, they resembled pre-printed marketing material. I knew we could do better, so I took the bad proposals to my boss to help him understand what the competition was doing and that we weren’t much better. We made some changes to our documents and won several of those new documents, got good feedback from brokers and that was enough to convince everyone else.

If you had to recommend one book to proposal managers, what would it be? (It doesn’t have to be specifically about proposals!)

Wow, there are lots of good books, but it doesn’t have to be a book. Last year, I completed Dale Carnegie’s Leadership Skills training, and it gave me so many new skills. I would recommend anything that helps you to be a leader and not just a manager. Frequently, we are ‘managing’ people who don’t need to be ‘managed.’ Our teams need to be led, encouraged, shown the way to make their jobs a career choice. They need help in creating a path to continually improve in that career. We need to go to bat for them with our superiors so they can get what they need to stay in those positions, providing important continuity to their Firms and their teams. That usually calls for more than a book.

“If buyers wrote good RFPs, they’d receive good proposals in return. In the meantime, they should stop complaining!” Discuss.

“If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their fannies.” It’s not my place to complain or lament that RFPs aren’t better, they are what they are. Lots of time they’re vague and redundant, but that’s why my team is valued - we can cut through the vagueness and the redundancy using the tools we have available from our experience. Regardless, it is the client’s game with their rules - period. It’s my job to make sure that we know those rules and if we don’t it’s my team’s responsibility to ask the necessary questions to position my Firm for a win.

Here’s the review of a restaurant called “Brussels Sprouts”, from the Luxe guide to Singapore.

The malty brews and steaming hot moules are must haves at this breezy bistro and bar. 01-12 The Pier, Robertson.

Excluding the address, that’s 16 words. The other guidebook I was using for reviews when I was there last year featured a description of the same restaurant that ran to 532 words, and said little more that would have helped me to decide whether or not to eat there.

Then there was the 20-word review of a trendy-looking fish place I wandered past:

Dress down and prepare to get messy. No Signboard Seafood is over-bright, noisy, bustly and famous for its white-pepper crab.

Again, I can pretty much get the gist of what the place is going to be like, and whether and when I might want to go. Now, I’m a fairly experienced traveller, and pretty used to finding places to eat in far-flung cities. Had I been a novice to overseas travel, or a less regular diner, I might have appreciated the extra detail. So writing to meet the needs of the reader is clearly key.

But I did think that this was a cool illustration of the power of succinct, sharp writing. And I’d hazard a guess that the writers at Luxe spent far longer polishing their twenty-or-fewer words than their competitors did over their five hundred plus.

Anyone who has attended a workshop or a presentation that we’ve delivered has heard us speak about the need to use terms with which the customer is familiar, to be very careful with the use of jargon or industry terms and above all, to ensure the customer understands what it is you’re talking about.The need for this became very clear when I overheard a conversation recently between two children, a boy of 6 and a girl of 4.

The boy, very proudly, said to the girl, “I’m going with my family to the Bahamas.”

The girl responded by asking, “What’s a “Bahamas”.

Providing an example of what many of us will no doubt see as way too close to real life, the boy then responded, very sheepishly I might add, with “I don’t really know what a Bahamas is.”

Whilst I’m talking about the national museum in Singapore (or, more particularly, its restaurant!), I was mesmerised by one of the exhibits, Suzann Victor’s “Contours of a Rich Manoeuvre 2006″.Eight red chandeliers hung from a high ceiling. To quote the museum’s description:

Installed at three metres above the floor of the bridge and one and a half metres apart, each chandelier swings across the bridge’s width in sequence or in a staggered pattern. The lights on each chandelier intensify to maximum brightness on the inward arch and dim on the outward arc.

Every time one emerged from one gallery, to walk to the next, the chandeliers had swapped to a different choreographed routine: ‘Pairs’, ‘Tattoo’, ‘In Rank’, ‘Helix’, each combination swinging for thirty minutes.

But then I found myself on the bridge, looking up, and the exhibit was still. “It’s broken,” was my first thought - and then I looked at the placard describing the artwork. There, it was explained that, twice per day, the chandeliers performed a half-hour “break”. And, rather remarkably, this sense of quiet-where-there-was-usually-motion inspired a very deep sense of peace, calm, stillness in the viewer.

For a proposal manager, one of the bravest things to do when working on a longer project is to know when to stand the team down - to make them take a break, to send them home, even though deadlines are looming. There’s the ever-present fear that “we must keep going” and “we must be seen to be working flat out”. Yet taking that downtime can do wonders for morale, motivation, energy, well-being - and creativity. And you’ll be amazed at how the team more than makes up in the following days for what some might see as ‘lost’ time, both in terms of their output and (more importantly) its quality.

“Getting Graphic”

Please describe your current role?

I am a partner at 24 Hour Company, a firm that specializes in graphics for proposals. These das my primary role is the development of workshops and tools to share my best practices and secrets with proposal professionals. Previously I designed graphics and presentations for proposals, something I still do on occasion. I am committed to helping the proposal industry evolve and I recently released the third book in a series on graphics, Do-It-Yourself Billion Dollar Business Graphics.

How did you first get involved in proposals?

Reluctantly. Nine years ago I had a choice to make: a) become a partner at a multimedia firm or b) become a partner at a proposal graphics firm (24 Hour Company). “What’s a proposal?” was my first reaction. However, as I learned more about the proposal industry, I soon saw it as an underserved market. I knew it would continue to grow and mature, and I wanted to be a part of its growth. Part of my continuing to enjoy working on proposals is the adrenaline rush that comes with the pressure of working to a deadline, having to produce the highest-quality documents possible and competing.

What characteristics do you feel make for a first-class proposal?

Interdependence. The proposal team must work together and communicate properly. They must have a schedule and a plan and stick to it. I want everyone to be on the same page. For example, I want the Capture Manager, sales lead, or person closest to the future client to share what s/he knows with the proposal team (everyone on the team… not just key personnel).

Play to the individual’s strengths: A subject matter expert should not spend hours designing a graphic if they have a designer on their team. It would be a waste of the team’s time and money for a subject matter expert to make graphics when they could be focused on developing the solution or writing.

Compete to win, not just “let’s-just-go-for-it”. The work should start before the RFP is released with a rough sketch of the solution at a very high level that slowly gets down into the weeds (linking back to the high-level view of the solution) If the team can picture the solution, they will have a much better chance of effectively explaining it in writing. I have seen hundreds of times where once the team can visualize the solution, the writing comes easy and they tell a story that solves the future client’s problem.

Link features to benefits and discriminators. The proposal must be audience focused. It also needs to look like a first-class proposal-aesthetically appealing, no clip art, well formatted, consistent, and well edited.

In addition, a first-class proposal needs to be easy to evaluate and score and it needs to follow the RFP.

If you were given responsibility for a proposal center, what would you do first?

Talk to the team. I would have and schedule time for a free flowing conversation addressing specific areas and questions with the team to understand their wants, needs, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses. I would review their processes and systems, as well as the company’s products, services and offerings. Lastly, I would evaluate old proposals and find out what worked and what did not and why.

I would then develop a plan for developing and streamlining proposal development. I would get the team involved so everyone had ownership of our new process/system. I would also involve senior management in the process and get their input and support to help make changes as needed and get funding approved.

How do you respond to those who claim, “It’s all about price”?

Hockey Puck! If this were true the lowest cost solution provider would always win. RFPs from any U.S. government agency state that the proposal will be awarded to the company showing they can provide the “best value” not “lowest cost.”

Many proposals win because the sales representative or capture manager did a fantastic job developing rapport with the future client and learning their hot buttons and key issues (often not stated in the RFP), giving the team give an edge over the competition.

I’ve even heard stories of proposals winning because of the cover! One such story is of a military agency that needed a product built. Only one company had the product ready-to-go, and they put a picture of it on their proposal cover. Ironically, they almost lost because the proposal was so poorly written; however, they showed the product working on the cover so they won. In addition, their proposal had the highest cost.

What’s the worst (or funniest) proofreading error you’ve ever seen in a proposal?

“Jerminal Arena Destruct Limes.” It should have read: “Terminal Area Destruct Lines”

If you were to recommend one book to proposal managers, what would it be? (It doesn’t have to be specifically about proposals!)

I’d have to say, “Do-It-Yourself Billion Dollar Business Graphics: 3 Fast and Easy Steps to Turn Your Text and Ideas into Graphics That Sell.”

We asked over 400 proposal professionals what their biggest proposal challenges were and one of the top challenges listed was translating words and ideas into graphics. (I’m sure it sounds self-serving to recommend a book I’ve written but I know the value of the best practices and “secrets” in this book.)

I can’t stress enough the power of visual communication. Too many proposals are lost because the winning solution gets lost in a sea of words or is missed because the graphic is indecipherable. Visuals (even rough sketches) get everyone on the same page fast! Good graphics are proven to increase success rates by 43%. The book shows proposal professionals how to translate their winning solutions into a memorable, compelling graphics.