I received an e-mail a few days ago from a past participant of a workshop I presented….in 2002!

This person said that she often referred back to the workbook from that course and that she had put many of the concepts into practice. She had recently joined a new company and was writing to introduce me to the head of business development for her company.

As I was writing a brief introduction in response, I realized it might prove interesting to readers here.

“Bobbie (name changed just so I could say ‘name changed’ here.),

It is most flattering that you continue to find the information from the workshop valuable and that it’s helped you improve your proposals and win rates. Always nice to hear. And thanks for introducing me to Jake (not his real name either. Trust me Jake works much better.)

Jake,

In her mail to me Bobby said you are one of those who ‘get it’. That’s good to know as my experience says that having someone in your position who does in fact ‘get it’ is critical to a companies having the necessary proposal capabilities. (And my experience is that those who truly do ‘get it’ are not in the majority.)

The analogy I often use is one of ‘fires’.

There are those companies wherein the proposal folks are making a futile attempt at ‘putting out fires’ (reactive) using ‘buckets of sand’ (less than adequately resourced and over capacity). And in these same companies the ‘powers that be’ (sales director and above) often don’t even smell the smoke

Those companies wherein those powers that be DO ‘get it’, undertake initiatives (proactively) to ensure their sales force is equipped (supported) to submit a first-class proposal for every opportunity they pursue (and the significantly higher win rates reflect this!).”

So dear readers, ask yourselves –

• Are you ‘putting out fires with buckets of sand’?
• Do the ‘powers that be’ even ‘smell the smoke’?

If the answer is yes, maybe you need to undertake initiatives to make raise the visibility of proposal within your company and ensure you have someone on high who truly ‘gets it’.

Learning reviews are a waste of time.

Well, they shouldn’t be, of course. But the sad reality is that (from the perspective of the proposal team, at least), they usually fail to lead to any real change.

Debating this with a client in Germany shortly before Easter, I came up with a list of four disconnects that act as barriers in the process for lost deals – even if a review does take place.

First, there’s the disconnect between the real reasons why a vendor lost and the story that buyer tells to the salesperson. So much easier as a buyer to send the account team away with “you lost on price” (and hence aren’t personally to blame) than to tell the whole truth.

Second, there’s the disconnect between whatever the buyer tells the salesperson, and the spin that the salesperson feeds back to their organisation. There’s a degree of self-protection at play, resulting in sanitised messages and “it wasn’t my fault”.

Third, there’s the disconnect between the messages the salesperson feeds back, and any learning specifically about the quality of the proposal. It’s vital for the organisation to know about pricing, solution quality and suchlike. But the proposal team need to know what the buyer thought of the document itself (and how it compared to those of their competitors), and these topics are rarely discussed.

And finally, there’s the disconnect between the outcomes of the review and the actions that should result. I can often look back over a dozen learning reviews that an organisation has conducted over the past six months, to find that they all show the same fundamental causes – yet nothing substantive has been done. If you don’t schedule the follow-up checkpoints with someone with clout – to take place (say) three months later - nothing will happen.

Just seen a reminder for next week’s UKAPMP session. Sadly, I can’t make it: my wife’s due home that day after two weeks out of the country, and I do occasionally have to try and balance work and life! (I love attending these sessions, though. Having been the first CEO of APMP in the UK, it’s wonderful to see how the organisation has grown since its inception five years ago).

The topic is “Red Team Reviews”. I struggle with the very terminology.

Most good proposal writers devote hours to removing unnecessary jargon from their documents, making them as easy as possible for the customer to understand. I can therefore never understand why, as a profession, we seem to revel in creating our own jargon. “Red team”, “blue team”, “magenta team” (I made that last one up, but I’m sure there’s someone out there right now preparing for a Magenta Review Meeting).

It all adds to the mystique of the proposal process, and acts as yet another barrier for salespeople and content contributors – who dislike writing proposals at the best of times. We make them learn an entirely new language, before they can even join in! What on earth is wrong with “Independent Review”, “Peer Review”, or some other phrase that stops us hiding behind unnecessary gobbledygook?

And whilst I am being provocative, if the jargonistic title is number one on my list of pet hates, the remainder of my “top ten common pitfalls” in this area would probably be as follows:

2.   Late, inadequate briefing of review participants.
3.   Inexperienced (or, perhaps, inappropriately experienced) review participants (“Please read this as if you were the customer. What, you’ve never evaluated a proposal on the customer side of the table? Oh well, have a go anyway!”).
4.   Lack of training for review participants. (“Hey, just have a go!”)
5.   Participants who are too close to the opportunity in question - and who therefore seek to impose their own pre-existing prejudices on the document.
6.   The “red team” (bah, humbug) being the first independent review that takes place. (Far better if you can capture wise ideas from the “great and the good” early, using outputs from a proper strategy and storyboarding session).
7.   Reviews conducted too late, giving too little time for the review itself, and too little time to incorporate any feedback.
8.   A poor feedback process. Pity the poor proposal manager, in the dying days of the proposal effort, desperately trying to pull in the final remaining content – and being dragged off to hear the oh-so-superior red team’s comments!
9.   Confused scope. (There’s one leading consultancy out there, who’d better remain nameless, who sees proofreading as a core activity for the “red team”. Yikes. The people who have the right skills to peer review your document are most certainly not the people you want to be your proofreaders).
10.  Excessive internal focus. No matter how hard you try to get the team to review through customer-tinted-spectacles, there’s a tendency to default back to analysing the risks to your organisation should you win.

As always, comments welcome! I’m sure they’ll have a lively debate at UKAPMP next week.

PS - BJ: please can you red team this entry for me before I post it? I need your comments within the hour. Make sure you proofread it carefully for me, won’t you?. (Joke!).

I attended the ‘To Bid or Not to Bid’ session presented by Jay Herther at the recent Pragmatech User Forum. (I attended in a show of support as Jay is a fellow ‘Nashuan’ [as us folks who reside in Nashua, NH {Greater Boston} refer to ourselves] and a fellow member of the NorEaster’ APMP chapter.) For those of you who didn’t attend the Pragmatech User Forum, you’ll have another opportunity to catch Jay’s presentation at the annual APMP conference in New Orleans in May.

Jay used an analogy within his presentation that I really liked and he kindly said I could share it with you.

Jay compared going after different types of bids to various shots in basketball. In basketball, each shot is of a different level of difficulty and the percentage that it might result in a basket and points, varies with that level of difficulty. Each shot also carries some risk that the other team will take possession of the ball. The points are also different for a more difficult shot than one that is deemed easier.

Now, I’m not a big sports fan like Jay, but I get the basic concept. Jay used three types of shots in his analogy; Lay-ups, 3 pointers and from half court.

And the approximate associated percentages he offered were -

• Lay-up - 85%
• 3 point -  < 30%
• Half court - <10%

Jay explained that if a basketball player had unlimited time and unlimited shots, it would make sense for them to take any shot at any time. But, just like us proposal people, basketball players rarely have unlimited time, energy or opportunities. Generally speaking, all of these are limited. Also, as each shot carries risk, the player needs to assess and consider this before taking the shot. Given all this, the logical approach is to take the shot where the chance of success is the greatest and the risk is the lowest.

Now it does happen that a team can be in a position to take a 3 point or a half court shot. This is usually when they are significantly ahead or have strategically positioned themselves so that they have a high probability of success and have minimized the risks.

I think the corollary to proposals is fairly obvious, right? Proposal resources are always finite and typically over capacity. To maximize effectiveness, these limited resources need to be used on those opportunities that have been carefully and fully qualified and the probability of success is greatest. Doing anything less, you’ll just be taking a lot of shots and not making many baskets!

Thanks Jay…and I’ll see you in New Orleans.

I’d arranged to grab a coffee yesterday with a good friend who’s very senior in the world of procurement. As usual when it starts to pour with rain, I’d forgotten my umbrella, so I was sheltering inside a Waterstone’s bookstore across the street from his office. (Hey, any excuse to browse, right?).

He came and dragged me out. As we left, he commented on a prominent display of paperback novels priced at 99 pence each. (That’s about a dollar fifty, for those of you Stateside). “They must be dreadful books if they’re selling them that cheap,” he commented. Actually, they’re all from acclaimed authors – some even shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize.

Now, my colleague Richard and I are currently finalising the slide pack for our presentation at this year’s APMP conference in New Orleans. We’re discussing the role of price in proposal evaluation. (The session will be presented in the style of a courtroom drama, for those of you who are going to attend!). The “99p books” debate illustrates an important point.

Of course, purchasers are often looking for low prices, cost savings, discounts, reduced costs of ownership, greater value. But if the price falls too low, buyers get suspicious. There must be a problem! What am I overlooking? How could this come back to haunt me? Too good to be true: RISKY! I often work on proposals where the bid team knows it won’t be cheapest; playing subtly with some of these messages can be a very powerful ploy.

One of the documents I handed out at the Pragmatech User Forum was the “Proposal Professionals’ Bill of Rights”.

The participants obviously related to these as I handed out more than 200 8” x 10” versions as well as another 150 organizer sized versions. And I’m getting requests daily for additional copies. (I’ve even had a request from one company to make this document available to their employees through the company server.)

This is, of course, most flattering but more importantly, it let’s me know that the concepts we present are embraced and shared by our fellow proposal professionals. (It also makes me think there’s still a lot more to be done to ‘’advance the standard’ within many companies.)

Of course, I’m happy to provide a copy to anyone who would like one. Just send me a mail and I’ll send you the file. (We’ll also have them available at the booth at the APMP conference in New Orleans.)

Just finished presenting ‘The Top Ten Things You Can Do (Today) To Improve Your Proposals’ at the Pragmatech User Forum. (This year’s forum  is being held in Washington D.C.)

This was one of 3 concurrent sessions, and it was scheduled late in the afternoon on the second day of the conference so I really wasn’t sure how many people would select this presentation. I was pleasantly surprised to have a standing room only audience of more than 70 people.

I began by asking, ‘How many of you are seeing me present for the first time?’ and was surprised to see the majority of hands go up. I went into the session thinking that more than half of the people there would have previously attended a session I had presented, given that I have present at APMP for the past several years (and presented at the annual, the UK annual and at the Southern Accents Chapter last year!). I suppose this indicates that there are a great many proposal people out there that aren’t yet involved with APMP. (Joining the association was #10 on my list within the presentation.) Of course, as is my style, I then asked, “And how many of you have never seen me present before?” and had about a dozen hands go up which caused a bit of laughter and to which I commented, “Just testing to see who’s still awake at this time of the afternoon on the second day of the forum.”

The session must have resonated with the audience as the feedback was overwhelmingly positive (5 out of 5) and the majority of the participants (75%) suggested (some very strongly) that this session should have been given more time.

With only 30 minutes, I had to cover the topics very quickly and at a high level, but here too, participants I spoke with after the session commented that they found the information extremely valuable. Handouts of the presentation were provided to the participants and I’ve had a great many requests for additional copies to be given to associates of participants who were unable to attend the conference.

Within the presentation I provided a sneak preview of the presentation for the upcoming Annual APMP Conference - “Two Proposal Managers Walk Into A War Room…” – that will be co-delivered by Jon and I along with a good friend and fellow consultant Izzy Gesell (Izzy specializes in the use of humor within the work and is the author of ‘Playing Along’). I included my ‘Top Ten Signs’ that you might be a proposal professional, delivered in the style of Jeff Foxworthy, best known for his, ‘You Might Be Redneck’ routines. These included, “If you’ve ever received flowers, candy and a thank you note…from a paper company, you might be proposal professional.” And “If you’ve ever helped a child with a book report, and suggested they convene a ‘Red Team Review’, you might be a proposal professional.” You’ll have to attend the APMP conference to hear the others.

If the amount of laughter was an indicator (having even managed to cause one woman to laugh so hard she ‘snorted’ (high praise indeed to this presenter!), then it would appear that the audience related to these observations as well.

The Pragmatech folks who were in the room stated that next year they’d like to have me do a longer, non-concurrent session. I’m flattered.

Steve Jensen, who does a fabulous job co-ordinating the speaker programme for the APMP conference each year, writes asking for suggestions regarding books to be sold at this year’s event.

Made me wonder about my wish list. How about this for a top five?

Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, of course. The best covering letter in history, and a perfect guide for proposal people on how to deal with their sales colleagues.

“Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson. Won the Pulitzer last year. We talk about great proposals being ‘a joy to read’, and this novel fits that description than any other. I strongly believe that the best way to learn how to write better is to read more!

“Let’s Get Real, Or Let’s Not Play” by Mahan Khalsa. I don’t agree with every word by any means, but it’s the most wonderfully provocative and entertaining book on selling.

The awesome “Copy-Editing : The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers: Books” by Judith Butcher. Should have pride of place on any business writer’s bookshelf (next to a good dictionary!), even though it’s not cheap. Great for settling arguments: “Should my bullet-point list have semi-colons at the end of every item?”

“Why Business People Speak Like Idiots” by Fugere, Hardaway and Warshawsky. BJ and I are forever buying books for one another; this is the best he’s fired my way in the past few months. I know he’ll post about it at some point, so I won’t steal his thunder!

Then again, maybe Steve wouldn’t appreciate such a tongue-in-cheek list. And although BJ and I have been asked to write a book by a most eminent publisher (you heard it here first!), perhaps I should wait until we’ve done the hard work and nominate our own volume in a fit of immodesty.