Posted by Jon on 8 October, 2006 under Word play & writing | 
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…
Posted by BJ on 6 October, 2006 under Musings |
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.
Posted by Jon on 4 October, 2006 under Processes & best practice, Purchasing insights |
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!
Posted by BJ on 2 October, 2006 under Musings |
Okay, maybe that’s not exactly how the quote goes. But it certainly applies to this entry.
Over the past weekend my wife and I have been painting. This has been on my wife’s ever expanding ‘honey do’ list for some time now.
Now, I’ve done a fair amount of painting in my time (and yes Jon, the readers do appreciate that would be quite a long time. I don’t think they need you to point that out. At least not every time.). My wife Azra hadn’t had any experience painting prior to this.
Azra was very eager to paint. As I was unloading various supplies I had purchased from the local DIY store (that’s British speak for ‘Do It Yourself’ for those who haven’t spent much time in England – what we know simply as Home Depot), Azra already had her brush in hand.
I pointed out that we had a good deal to do before we could start painting. First we had to move all the furniture to the center of the room. Then we needed to remove all the switch plates from around the many outlets and wall switches in the room (approximately 237 or so it seemed after dealing with all those tiny screws). Once done with that we had to put down drop clothes and cover everything.
Azra was not happy to hear that she’d have to do all this before she was able to start painting.
And there was more preparation to do before the painting started. We also had to tape all the edges. This would allow us to move quickly and easily, doing most the major section with a roller, as the tape would protect the edges. But this also meant we’d have to, in painters’ terms, ‘cut in’ the edges (painting the edge with a brush, because the roller can’t get in there).
With an impatient Azra wondering if she’d ever get to actually paint, we finished getting the room ready to paint. The preparation took us more than 2.5 hours.
Finally, we were able to start painting. Azra had all sorts of fun, and as you’d except of a novice painter, ended up wearing a fair amount of paint herself (let me know if want wish to see the pictures). And in no time at all (about 45 minutes, the first coat was up and on and the room had been transformed (for those who care about such things we had painted Bright Biscuit #456-98 over the original Oyster White #SW764).
Azra was quite amazed at how little time she’d actually painted, and how much time we’d spent on preparation.
As with other entries, I need not point out the obvious parallels, right? :-)
