“I didn’t know what to say, so I wrote utter rubbish.”

That’s the first of the content experts’ Behaviours Styles that our colleague Graham Ablett defined in his excellent presentation with Dell’s Liz Pocknell at the recent UK APMP conference. I loved the example from a recent proposal that he used to illustrate the output that results from this type of behaviour:

“When you re-brand our global service touch points to deliver reliably consistent services, you can make your IT strategy roll out to each country”

My other favourite from Graham’s list illustrated Expert Behaviour Style D, namely “It was four in the morning and my typing was suffering”:

“…strong relationships amongst our client base and experience obtained from forking with us.”

Pardon?!

Graham and Liz used these as input to a case study sharing the benefits of building and maintaining a pre-written content library in a multi-language environment. The secret, they suggested, was to build a base language library in a structured and logical fashion – allowing easy record identification for translations and knowledge base maintenance activity. They suggested four straightforward steps to build this base language library:

• Content – careful prioritisation to determine what material should be developed for the knowledge base
• Ownership – identifying the relevant experts, and selling the importance of the library to them
• Skills – having a clear process in place, with appropriate training and resource, to develop excellent content
• Tools – making content accessible. (Liz shared experiences from Dell’s success with the Pragmatech product set)

If you missed the conference (hey, it’s an expensive trip for those of you in the States!), email us, and we’ll be happy to forward a copy of the presentation!

PS thanks to Mike White, who also presented at the event, for an email observing that “I received my bill from the Balmer Lawn Hotel today, only to find that I had been to the AMPM conference”. A particularly entertaining error - given that quite a few delegates seemed to have had such an enjoyable “pm” that they were very bleary-eyed the following “am”!

Those of you who work out on a regular basis (you might have to use your imagination here, Jon) will be well aware of the value and importance of stretching before you begin your workout. Stretching warms up the muscles slowly and prepares them for the more strenuous exercise to come. In this way, you prevent damage that would be caused by enlisting your muscles to do work before they were ready.

My favorite illustration of this is how ‘Silly Putty’, that wonderful, mysterious children’s toy, reacts to being stretched. If the putty is cold and hard, or pulled too fast, it snaps. But when warm and soft, it stretches to amazing lengths. I also like to consider how most animals stretch when they first get up. This is especially true of cats. Those who have owned me in the past have absolutely refused to move until they’ve gone through their set of yoga moves.

So what does this have to do with proposal, right? (I can see Jon tapping his pen, doing his best to be patient here, all the while thinking, “Would you please get to the point here B.J.?”). Well, the concept of doing mental stretching and preparing our brains for the heavy lifting ahead each day came to mind the other morning at the breakfast table.

You see, part of my morning routine is to do the ‘Jumble’ puzzle. I suspect many of you will be familiar with and perhaps attempt to solve this each day. For those of you not familiar with the puzzle, it consists of four words which are scrambled that, when unscramble reveal the answer to a question or phrase. I find it to be great for getting my mental juices flowing. I also find it fascinating that a scrambled four or five letter word, typically a very common one, can occasionally be nigh on impossible to unscramble. And it’s downright infuriating when it is revealed to be a very common word and is, upon revelation, intuitively obvious (though it certainly wasn’t prior to that point!).

In addition to being a great way to get my brain in gear (don’t go there Jon!), I also find knowing that there is a solution, and not being able to immediately see it, prepares me for persevering when attempting to solve the problems and puzzles that I’ll no doubt encounter throughout my day. It definitely conditions me to look at things a variety of ways and to try to see what I might be missing.

Jon and I also use ‘stretching’ exercises when working with proposals teams. This might be ‘The World’s Best Proposal’ to help team members visualize the best case end result during a kick-off meeting, or it might be a problem or puzzle to prime a group during a strategy development session.

So consider what you’re doing for stretching and warming up that major muscle – your brain – before starting your day or a challenging activity. If mental stretching is already part of your routine, great. If not, give it a try and see if it doesn’t improve your performance (and lessen the pain afterwards). And if you managed to unscramble the third word of yesterday’s Jumble puzzle, don’t tell me the answer. I’m still working on it.

I’m convinced that Scott Adams, the brilliant cartoonist and creator of Dilbert, has had a fair amount of experience in the proposal world.

In a couple of recent strips we meet a guy who always has an answer and it seems to almost make sense.

And I’ve no doubt, you’ve encountered the sales person or subject matter expert who submits a draft filled with similar statements… and that you, like me, have had a similar reaction to the one below.

Luckily, none of us have ever written or submitted anything like that, right? :)

The BBC recently started screening their glossy new adaptation of “Robin Hood”, to much critical acclaim. I caught an interview with the director, Dominic Minghella, in which he described their creative process. I could immediately see parallels with the proposal world - in the same way, for example, that my imagination was sparked a few months ago by an exhibition about Pixar’s storyboarding technique.

When developing a proposal, we often find that we’ve seen similar questions in past RFPs - and offered similar solutions to previous customers. And, of course, the most effective proposal centres out there can draw from their library of excellent pre-written content. Yet the proposal right now for this customer, to these evaluators, for this specific opportunity, against these particular competitors, still has to feel fresh and relevant. Indeed, our research with buyers (and my own personal experience on the evaluators’ side of the table) shows that customers hate nothing more than standard text that was evidently first written for “someone else”.

Minghella faced a similar challenge adapting a story that’s been seen in dozens of previous formats. (My own benchmark is the Disney adaptation, with a fox as the eponymous hero). So, the team locked themselves away in a comfortable room, filled with anything Robin Hood-related that they could get hold of. Books crammed the shelves; posters lined the walls; cuddly toys were cuddled; projections of past movies filled the screens. And for weeks they watched, and listened, and talked, and absorbed…

…and then they walked into the neighbouring room, identical in every respect, but with bare walls, empty bookcases – and started to work out their cut on the story.

Oh for the luxury of time to immerse oneself to that level of detail in the proposal world! Yet I can see how one might adapt the technique, either for live deals (given sufficient war room space) or as a trick to creating new pre-written content, fast.

Dewar’s scotch is running an ad on TV that presents the following quote (which they attribute to one Tommy Dewar):

“The less a person has to say, the more words they’ll use to say it.”

It seems to me this is often the case with content within proposals, and especially within executive summaries. I certainly see my share (and I’d guess many of those of you reading this will have as well) of executive summaries that are long, rambling and without any apparent key message or even the remotest of plots. It’s as if the person creating these documents thinks if the content is long enough they’ll eventually stumble onto some sort of message. Or perhaps they’re just trying to lull the reviewers to sleep (and I’ve no doubt their submissions succeed in doing that!).

I do see crisp, concise exec sums that have a clear message and tell a compelling story (and I hope many of you have as well). My experience is that these are created by individuals who have a solid grasp of the customer’s concerns/issues, have a clearly defined position for their offering and know why they are submitting a response. They know what they want to say and they say it… in as few words as possible, rather than the other way around.

A recent excavation in my office (an occasional activity, driven by the certain knowledge that I once did possess that particular long-lost piece of paper that I now so-desparately need) unearthed in passing a fascinating article that I clipped some time ago from the New Yorker, about Jorn Utzon, the Sydney Opera House architect.

There were three anecdotes that I loved, which readers here might enjoy. Discussing another of Utzon’s projects, when he was trying to design a low-cost housing development in Denmark, it comments:

“He developed his design by thinking about the various people who might inhabit such housing. He imagined the families in detail, writing short stories about them.”

How lovely. I can see the extension to proposals: a short story about each of the users, or buyers, or managers of a service that you’re about to deliver, as part of a design session.

Moving on: the architect used to tell ‘an anecdote about the Danish furniture designer Kaare Kilmt.

Someone comes to Klimt’s studio and asks him, “What are you working on?”

Klimt replies, “I’m working on a chair.”

Eighteen months later, the same man visits and again asks Klimt what he is working on.

“I told you,” Klimt says, “I’m working on a chair.”

Wow! Would that I had such patience.

And then my favourite of the quotes that I circled, and perhaps the most relevant to proposal readers. Construction of the magnificent Opera House was often fraught. As difficulties began to mount, Utzon “recalled something the engineer on the project, Ove Arup, had said to encourage him”:

“He said it is like when you climb Everest. You get a glimpse of Everest, and then it disappears. For a long time, all you see are the rows of hills in your way, and you can’t imagine that you will ever get there. And then, suddenly, you see Everest again, sparking in the sunshine.”‘

Having been fortunate enough to visit Tibet a few years back, heading up to Everest Base Camp (the easy way - by Land Rover!), I can certainly relate to the comment. I guess a few proposal efforts feel a little like climbing Everest; establishing a clear vision of the summit from the outset is so important to keep the team going through the tough moments.

While reviewing content within a knowledge base for a client, an associate who shall remain nameless (big shout out to Diane!) came across the following and sent it my way. I’m posting it here for all of us to enjoy together.

From an answer regarding disaster recovery:

“Data is backed up and stored in a geographically adverse area.”

Perhaps this is to suggest the bad guys in that particular part of town will keep others away?

Apparently, the word ‘proposal’ was first used in the English language “before 1550″.

That sets my mind spinning in creative – and silly – directions. One can imagine, for example, Michelangelo working late into the night in 1546. His task? Responding to Pope Paul III’s Request for Proposal for the design contract for St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

I wonder whether they had pizza delivery in Rome in those days, to help when they were trying to pull their proposals together at the last minute, by candlelight? At least the client would be confident that the quality of the graphics in his proposal would be pretty high…

An interesting footnote to my previous post about parallels between painting and proposals. As I stated at the beginning of the entry, I’ve done a fair amount of painting. What I didn’t say was that I hadn’t done much of this in the past 5 or so years.

While picking up the supplies for the job, I found a great many new tools on the market. One of these was a simple little cup sort of device – an ingeniously designed little bucket of sorts that was designed to be used while doing the cutting of the edges that I mentioned. It held a small amount of paint, had a handle, a well for a brush and most importantly, a sill that allowed the excess paint to be wiped off and this fell inside the bucket rather than outside the edge. It proved to be a great tool.

My point here – and I do have one (as Ms. Degeneres might say) – is that I discovered several new tools that made the job much easier.

Again, I’ve no doubt you get the parallels to our business, so I’m sure I need not point those out.

Many thanks to a friend who manages proposals for a technology company, for generously allowing me to share one of his wonderfully witty aphorisms:

“I keep trying to convince my sales colleagues that the Executive Summary should be the jewel in our proposals. The only problem is, with them it’s usually Ratner’s rather than Garrard’s”.

For American readers, I guess I ought to explain: Ratner’s was a low-end high-street jewellery chain in the UK, which was hastily rebranded after its eponymous CEO compared their product quality unfavourably to that of a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich. Garrard, on the other hand, is the royal jeweller.

Now, this leads into a contentious debate – in that the Executive Summary is possibly the worst-executed section of many proposals: a huge missed opportunity.

The traditional view, propagated by misguided sales trainers since time immemorial, is that the Executive Summary “is the only part of the proposal that the senior decision-makers read, and so should be written for them”.

Buyers out there - remind me: that last proposal you evaluated. Did your boss arrive in the evaluation room as your review team sat down to score the proposals, rip out the Exec Summaries from each of the documents, and disappear warning that “You can do what you like in the evaluation meeting, but I’ll read these few excerpts and then tell you the answer you should have come up with all along”?

No, thought not.

Absolutely there’s a need to think about how you influence the final decision-makers – the team to whom the evaluation group report their recommendations. And some organisations with whom we’ve worked have started to do really cool stuff with glossy executive-level brochures, separate from (but intrinsically related to) the main proposal document.

But the “Executive Summary” – that opening section within the bound proposal – needs to condition and convince the evaluation team that your proposition is going to be the best. After all, if they don’t put your name forward at the top of the pile when they make their recommendations to the great and the good in the customer’s organisation, you’re highly unlikely to win the deal.

So this crucial opening section needs to establish empathy, showing that you truly understand the challenges and opportunities that they’re facing. It needs to discuss the characteristics of a great solution. And, crucially, it needs to establish the key win themes that will flow through the rest of your document. Your opening salvoes need to ensure that evaluators read the document having already decided that yours is likely to be clearly the best of the options open to them!