The next time a sales person can’t (or just won’t) narrow the strategy down to no more than 3 points, tell them they are being a ‘mugwump’ (and then tell them to look it up!).

I’m not that technical. Well, I did start my career in IT, but I’ve made every effort to become less-and-less techie over the years – relying instead on others who do this stuff better.

But a little technical knowledge can go a long way. A Proposal Manager on a course recently bemoaned the fact that readers can un-track the changes on any Microsoft Word document. You can imagine the embarrassment if a client were to do so with your proposal, only to find lower pricing increased at the last moment, a higher-quality solution downgraded for the final version, a sarcastic aside about the quality of the client’s RFP deleted at the last moment.

No wonder most canny proposal teams default to issuing documents PDF. But the customer does still sometimes insist on a Word copy (perish the thought that they might then copy and paste your text into their own internal reports!).

The good news is that there is a fix, and I felt very virtuous being able to share it. For those of you who haven’t stumbled across it, it’s downloadable from Microsoft.

I think we should formally recognize the ability of proposals to generate entirely new words. I suggest we recognize a new science and call it ‘Newordology’ – n, The science of creating and using words that previously did not exist. Often consists of corrupting a word, changing the spelling, misapplying a word, combining two or more words.

Examples:

‘Clumbersome’. adj. Combining clumsy and cumbersome. To be both clumsy and cumbersome.

‘Aforegoing’ – adj. Combining ‘fore mentioned’ and forego. Means to mention and then immediately dismiss.

I know Jon has seen a fair number of newly coined (not to be confused with minted) words. And I’ve sure many of you reading these entries have a few of your own….and I’d enjoy to hear them.

Greetings from Afghanistan! Well, not actually from Afghanistan per se – from a plane seat 38,000 feet above it en route back from Australia to the UK. I’ve exhausted the catalogue of films (loved “Good Night, and Good Luck”, George Clooney’s movie about the McCarthy era – but how come he won the acting Oscar rather than the guy who played Ed Morrow?). So my mind wandered to proposals, and out came the laptop…

I was just pondering a discussion I had yesterday with a Sales Ops manager in Sydney, about the applicability of proposal ‘best practice’ to different audiences. He bought in very strongly to our “80/10/10” rule – 80% of what we do applies no matter what market you’re in, or where you’re operating in the world. 10% has to be tailored to the market and organisation we’re working with; 10% needs tweaking according to local culture.

It’s quite flattering to be invited to work with teams around the world. My personal list in the past couple of years includes Finland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, England, Scotland, USA, Ireland, China, Hong Kong, Australia, India, Belgium, Ireland, Singapore. Amusingly, despite being from the UK, Wales hasn’t featured on my personal list – although one of our team has been working there a fair amount of late (being from the valleys himself!).

So are there any proposal writers in Argentina or Brazil reading this and wanting help? BJ’s worked there, and I’ve been to both on vacation, but I’d love to go back. And I’m wondering about a side trip to New Zealand next time I’m in the Southern Hemisphere…?

But I do wonder what Afghan proposals would look like.

Currently on my file cabinet using our proposal magnets* -

• ‘Proposal people create cool concepts’
• ‘Always deliver a consistent story or you will lose’
• ‘Losing is stupid and feels awful’
• ‘Caffeine fuels my creativity’

A suggestion – To increase the possibilities, do as I’ve done and combine a set of the original ‘Magnetic Poetry’ with ours and  it has really increases the possibilities!

*If you don’t have a set already, see us at our booth at APMP and we’ll give you one!

PS if you work on proposals, and don’t know about the APMP conference, you probably should! Have a look at their website.

Depressing comment from Emily, a participant on today’s course for proposal staff drawn from across Australia: “On my first proposal, I cried every night”. Interesting how many people start work on proposals by being thrown in at the deep end, with no prior experience and no training. And yet Emily’s first proposal would have won or lost her company a potentially important piece of business.

I’m glad airlines don’t take the same approach. I can just imagine flying home on Saturday and hearing the greeting, “Hello from the flight deck, Sam here. A group of us were standing round at the airport in uniform, and they picked me out to fly the plane tonight. Not done it before, so fasten your seatbelts tight, and here’s hoping that I can work out what all of these levers are for.”

I so love getting companies to realise that developing a proposal isn’t a trivial task to be passed over to whomever happens to be at a loose end that day – or to be undertaken with no training whatsoever.

BJ and I are sitting in the back of a cab in Sydney. We’re both on the opposite sides of the earth to home, heading off to deliver a training course, and we get to chatting how we both love writing for pleasure. We’re forever exchanging notes and quips about proposals.

So I pipe up, “We ought to have a blog!”

And BJ agrees, and so here we are. (Well, here we are in the sense of writing the text. It’ll take us a couple of weeks to work out the technology, and then we’ll post whatever we’ve written to date en masse).

Of course, there are some who’d think us sad for talking about proposals and blogs rather than looking out of the window at the Opera House…