Sometimes, just sometimes, in the midst of all the spam comes a note that seems scarily relevant.

Kay Butcher wrote to me today, advertising a brand of dietary pills. Her opening line?

How many times did you get unhappy after noticing you keep ordering pizza after pizza?

Having coined the phrase “late nights, cold pizza” a few years ago to characterise the last-minute, under-resourced nature of so many proposal teams,* I’m pleased to hear that the solution is but a pill away. So much easier than finding the right senior sponsor, and building the case to have proposals taken more seriously….

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* Working with a team in Bangalore a few years back, BJ and I were amazed to find that this really is a universal diagnosis, as the Domino’s scooter pulled up at reception with our nourishment!

Hi. BJ here. Remember me?

Yeah, I know, you haven’t heard from me much. And I won’t make excuses for it. But in my defense, I will say that this is due to my being on the road and presenting in lots of different cities. So even if I haven’t been around here a whole bunch lately, rest assured I have been out there and have certainly been doing my share to promote a best practice approach to proposals and fostering the continued development of proposals as a profession.

Where have I been? Well, let’s see. In the past several weeks I’ve been in Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Sacramento and New York (and that’s not to mention the various airports in between. Ah, the joys and fun of O’Hare on a Friday night, can any place be more fun than that?).

I had the honor, privilege and pleasure of presenting the keynote at the Southern Proposal Accents Conference (SPAC). Thanks for the invite and the great support Michelle Norman! This conference was very well attended and the participants seemed to really enjoy my presentation – ‘Tools of the Trade – A Master Craftsman’s Perspective’

Then I presented at an RFI forum for a large healthcare consortium (which brought together some 20+ proposal groups), followed by a 2-day workshop for an investment management company, followed by a 1-day workshop for an insurance firm. Then I finished up with a half-day workshop at a conference for the investment management community presented by the Institute for International Research (IIR). And yes, I am just a little tired of traveling at this point and was most happy to spend a night in my own bed last night.

Throughout, I met people who were eager to learn more about the best practice approach to proposals and eager to improve their proposal capabilities and the quality of the proposal they produce.

And the really good news is I don’t travel again until, um, let’s see, oh, next week… sigh.

Next year’s APMP conference is due to take place in Savannah, Georgia from 29 May - 1 June 2007. Hopefully you’ll have the dates set aside already in your diaries.

The call for papers is now out, and the deadline’s fairly tight - there’s an 8 December cut-off date if you want to present. I’ve spoken at the past five conferences, and it’s tremendous fun. BJ’s been presenting there since about 1845 (sorry, that should read, “for even longer”). Hopefully we’ll be back on platform next year!

So if you’ve done cool stuff in your proposal centre in the past year, or worked on an interesting bid, do think about presenting. Speakers come from a huge variety of backgrounds - so don’t worry if you’ve not presented at previous events. Indeed, you’d probably be especially welcome if you’ve not presented at previous events!

Now, we know that it’s not always easy for some of you to persuade your boss to let you attend the conference at all. Sometimes getting a speaker slot can be a persuasive negotiating technique - and it also looks rather good on the resume!

OK, it’s not the place of this blog to be in any way political. But this morning’s news from UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell that:

“The expected cost of the 2012 London Olympic park has risen 40% since the games were won in July 2005”

seems directly relevant to bid and proposal professionals, resulting as it does from the UK’s major bid to the International Olympic Committee. Apparently:

“Ms Jowell told the Commons culture, media and sport committee the rise was partly due to a doubling in the price of steel and also a decision to revise transport costs to take into account inflation in the years to 2012”

Yep, like competent bid staff don’t build in contingency for raw materials price increases. Or inflation. Honestly, I ask you…

But hold on a moment. Let’s just have a little look on Google for a website showing steel prices to test the claims. Amazing how easily one can find proof that steel prices have indeed increased since the bid was won – but only by between 13% and 32%, depending on what type you’re buying (and following a fall of up to 10% in the month prior to the bid decision).

It gets better (or, rather, worse). The overrun:

“also included an extra £400m to pay “delivery partner” CLM to make sure the games came in on budget and on time.”

The bid was priced at £2.4bn (close on $5bn). Prices increased to £3.3bn. And they then decided to pay £400m to make sure the games came in on budget?! Horse? Stable door?

“The extra £900m cost was likely to be met by London council tax payers and lottery funds, Ms Jowell suggested.”

That’s OK, then.

Let’s have a quick vote. If a bid in your organisation went this badly wrong, this quickly, would you expect those accountable to keep their jobs? Especially if their explanations were so blatantly, lamentably flawed?

As I mentioned in a recent post here, I’ve been traveling quite a bit and doing lots of presenting. I’ve also been doing a fair amount of work helping clients develop their proposal capabilities (developing processes, reviewing/revising content, staffing, etc.)

And it’s all been going great, the presentation have been very well received and the participants have, very flatteringly, said they’ve found them very beneficial and enjoyable. And the work with clients is producing tangible benefits and we’re doing great things together.

But as rewarding as all this work is, I really miss being involved in a ‘real deal’. It’s been about 6 weeks or so since I last supported a live effort. (This was for an insurance company, was fairly complex and had a very short lead-time…and it was considered a ‘must win’ opportunity…and there was no shortage of pressure or focus on this!).

And what, you ask do I miss about working on a proposal effort like this? Well, everything I guess. I miss the planning, the strategizing, the team work and camaraderie, the crafting of answers and pieces of content. I miss the excitement of competing and doing everything possible to ensure we receive the maximum score and that the proposal produced puts us in the best position to win. Heck, I even miss the collating!

Does that make me strange? I don’t think so. I think those people who have had an opportunity to work on a proposal and to do some really creative work with a great team will know exactly what I mean.

Overheard at Heathrow as I waited for a flight the other day (with apologies to those of a sensitive nature for reproducing the quote verbatim, so that you get the full effect):

“You know how, on a farm, if a crow dies, they leave the corpse there to deter other crows? George has really scr*wed up on this. I think we should think of George as a crow.”

Reminded me of some proposal learning reviews I’ve attended…

The duo behind the immensely popular* comedy show, “Little Britain” are coming to the end of an incredibly successful tour of the UK: in one year, they’re apparently sold a million tickets and brought in £25m in revenues.

When the audience turn up for the show, they expect to see their favourite characters and hear their favourite punchlines.

The same applies at concerts. I’ve been to a couple recently (The Divine Comedy and Muse, as you ask) and it’s always the group’s best-known tunes that get the crowd singing along. Fans are unlikely to walk out humming that superb new track from the latest album, due out next week, if they’ve never heard it before.

I can see a direct analogy to the proposal world. If your audience has never heard of you, if they know nothing about your solutions, and have no idea of your story, they’re unlikely to look forward to reading your document – or to find it especially memorable. That’s one of the reasons why I place so much emphasis on the pre-proposal planning phase of any proposal efforts that I work on. As a proposal manager, I should be able to expect my proposal to be sown onto fertile ground, and I’ll fight for the right to harass and cajole the account manager into positioning our story with the customer’s decision-makers before our document lands on their desk.

* Well, it’s immensely popular in the UK. US readers may have to insert their own favourite show, or wait until it appears on HBO next year!

I was tempted, when writing my recent post about the characteristics of a great Proposal Manager, to include the phrase “able to think outside the box”. And then I stopped myself, remembering the two perfect ripostes to that particular clichéd phrase:

“He’s great at thinking outside the box. The problem is that his box is so small to start with.”

and

“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.” (Terry Pratchett)

If anyone can pinpoint the author of that first quote, which I picked up somewhere on my travels a few years back, I’d love to be reminded.

We fell into a discussion recently about roles within a proposal centre, considering the variety of skills needed to pull together a first-class document. To quote from a note I fired off to a friend who runs a proposal centre in the States:

Oh that it was easy to get someone who could simultaneously conduct that orchestra superbly, write an award-winning book, and draw a masterpiece… and that clients gave us long enough for one person to do everything necessary from a proposal perspective.

But, of course, these are very different skills – and time pressures mean that some sub-division of labour is essential. Either that, or affordability means that there has to be a trade-off.

So what of the “Proposal Manager” – “the conductor”, if you like? Take excellent project and people skills, and add in a healthy dose of creativity and lateral thinking. Make sure they’re a great facilitator, and adept at building internal relationships (often at the most senior levels). Check they can combine almost-paranoid attention to detail with an uncanny ability to help the team to see the big picture. Verify their ability to be calm under pressure, and to work brilliantly at six in the morning, on three hours’ sleep.

Require them to be highly “proposal savvy”. And (if it’s possible) make sure they know their way around your organisation and understand your market too – although this would be the area in which I’d compromise if I were recruiting for the role: a great proposal manager can lead a proposal team selling breakfast cereal to a supermarket or business-critical technology services with equal aplomb. But at least make sure they’re great strategic reviewers – able to dissect draft text and see where improvements need to be made, pushing towards a truly excellent document.

Finally, in some organisations, offer this mythical being the salary of a glorified administrator. And then wonder why you can’t get the staff!

Of course, these competencies are very different to those of a great Proposal Writer (brilliant at editing text and building one-to-one relationships with content contributors, but liable to run a mile if asked to stand up and facilitate a workshop). And the skill-set is poles apart from the great Word and design skills of a good Document Manager. But hey, we can expect them to do all of this brilliantly as well, right?

Most customers these days seem to ask for an electronic version of your proposal in addition to the traditional printed copies. Indeed, it’s far from uncommon nowadays to see instances where no paper is required at all.

The response from most proposal teams? Burn the files containing the proposal onto a CD, and – if they happen to have the right kit – print a nice CD label.

Consider the impact on the buyer. Your printed copy (one hopes) looks extremely professional; in comparison the CD is totally uninspiring!

BJ posted recently about the importance of keeping in touch with the latest tools in the market, and a good example for me has been the software that now exists to produce high-quality multimedia versions of your proposal, quickly and cost effectively. The step up in credibility that you get when buyer inserts your CD and sees a professional, branded, tailored screen – rather than the dull old list of sub-directories and files on your competitors’ CDs – is fairly easy to imagine.

It’s well worth a look across at QND, if you haven’t had a chance to explore this area yet. (And tell them the Proposal Guys said hi!)