Posted by Jon on 23 December, 2006 under Musings, Purchasing insights | 
This season’s record for pathetic purchasing? The buyer who sent a complex RFx to a team I’m working with at the moment at 2.34pm on Friday, 22 December. With a tight response time in the New Year.
I used a slide at a conference presentation a couple of years back headed “Purchasers are people too”, exploring the need for bidders to consider the evaluators’ emotions when writing a proposal. Sometimes I wonder whether the title was 100% accurate!!!
Never mind…! The festive season is upon us, and we wish our readers every happiness – and every success in 2007. We’ll be back posting at the start of January, and look forward to sharing further thoughts and tips during the coming year.
With best wishes to you all.
The Proposal Guys
Posted by Jon on 18 December, 2006 under Musings |
I was fortunate enough earlier in the year to see the incomparable Simon Russell Beale – far and away Britain’s greatest stage actor – in the Royal National Theatre’s “The Life of Galileo”.
I could relate personally to one particular phrase which caught my attention, describing the lead character as a man “who cannot resist an old wine or a new idea”.
Certainly new ideas are a stock in trade for the proposal professional – whether it’s improvements to your processes, your tools, the way you engage proposal team members, or the content in your documents themselves. It might be a useful point of reflection for some readers: what five new ideas have you implemented in the past twelve months, and what five cool things do you want to make happen in the coming year?
Russell Beale’s next role, apparently, is in the West End production of Spamalot, the Monty Python musical. I guess “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” has its relevance to a proposal manager too!
Posted by Jon on 14 December, 2006 under Purchasing insights |
When I’m working with buyers, I often emphasise that suppliers have a choice as to whether to bid for an opportunity or not. Many purchasers are instinctively dismissive: “If I’ve honoured them with my RFP, they’ll surely respond?”
Now, it’s true that many salespeople do believe that there’s a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. But the fact that good sales organisations qualify opportunities (often fairly ruthlessly) is news to many on the buying side. A recent anecdote in The Observer provided a useful anecdote on the perils for customers in this area:
“One construction industry source said that the Olympic Development Authority, which is building the infrastructure needed for the [London] Games, was in a weak position over the stadium because most major building firms did not tender for the contract”.
Purchasers need to understand that, while they hold many of the cards, under-estimating the strength of their hand can be potentially disastrous for their negotiating position. They need to sell the opportunity to potential bidders, just as those of us on the sales side need to sell our capabilities to them.
Posted by BJ on 12 December, 2006 under Musings |
While in Las Vegas to present a workshop at a RFI forum, my wife Azra and I rented a car to go out to Hoover Dam and Red Rock Canyon for the day. (See, I do know how to have a little work/life balance!)
During our travels we ventured down some back roads, beautiful but quite dusty. After a few miles Azra pointed out it was becoming increasingly difficult to see through the windshield (apparently I was too busy enjoying the scenery to notice.) So I hit the appropriate lever to activate the wiper and washer fluid. I got the former but none of the latter. Zip, nada, bone dry.
I stopped at the next gas station (some 10 miles down the road, going progressively slower as visibility decreased at an alarming rate), purchased a bottle of fluid, opened the hood and poured it in. A couple of clicks of the lever, a spray of washer fluid, a few swishes of the wipers – and we once again had a clean windshield. By the time we returned the car, I had forgotten all about having had to buy and put in fluid.
That was two weeks ago. Well, on my next trip I found myself picking up a rental car from this same company but at a different airport (San Francisco this time). Now I remembered having had to stop and fill up the fluid reservoir.
Not expecting anything other than to let someone know what had happened hoping that it would perhaps help the system improve, I mentioned to the person handling my reservation what had happened with the rental car in Las Vegas. I pointed out this had been two weeks ago, at a different airport, and I that didn’t have a receipt.
And what was this person’s response? Did she explain to me that there was nothing she could do? Or that I should have said something when I returned the car?
Nope. She immediately apologized that this had happened and said she would pass the information along to the Las Vegas crew. She also said she would put in a note in the system to remind the service people at her site to check the fluids.
I was impressed. No hassles, no reasons why she couldn’t help.
And then she did something that really impressed me. Without any prompting on my part, she said that, as compensation for any inconvenience, I wouldn’t have to fill up the tank when I returned the car. (As you can imagine, at today’s gas prices that could be as much $50 or more.)
Now that’s what I call customer service!
Sure, they could have checked the fluids better in the first place. And yes, it was slightly inconvenient to have to stop and put in fluid (I suspect it would have been even more difficult for you eh Jon, given your fondness for things mechanical!)
But this person could have, as tends to happen all too often in my experience, chosen not to do anything about the situation.
Instead, by her not taking an offensive position and by showing that she was concerned for my having been inconvenienced, she let me know that she (and by association the company) cared and did something to make me feel cared for and appreciated.
And because I know you’ll ask, it was Thrifty.
Posted by Jon on 8 December, 2006 under Word play & writing |
George Orwell: “In certain kinds of writing… it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.”
Posted by BJ on 6 December, 2006 under Musings |
I first started working on proposals in 1982 (just a couple of years before you, eh Jon?)
Back then -
- Knowledge base automation tools weren’t available (and wouldn’t be for another 14 years!)
- Word processors were in their infancy and much of the work was done on a typewriter.
- Spell check? What’s that?
- The only people with a computer in their home were true ‘geeks’ (as these computers had to be completely programmed manually… and they were about the size of a washing machine!)
- Laser printers were just being introduced (and had a nasty tendency to catch fire if the paper jammed!)
- ‘Cut and paste’ was often just that, literally. Pieces of paper and artwork were cut out and glued to another piece of paper and then copied.
- Color copiers? Yeah, right.
- Graphics were done by hand, either drawn or again, true cut and paste.
- E-mail was just getting started, and was largely only available intra-company, if at all.
- FedEx was the only viable shipping option.
I had reason to reflect on just how far we’ve come regarding today’s capabilities to produce proposals when I presented recently at a conference in NY.
As I stood at the back of the room, I noticed the phone that the person next to me was using. This was a new model, one which was fully enabled with MSWindows and applications for mobile.
And are you ready for this, folks?
This person was able to create a complete proposal – start to finish – on their phone. It was even able to access their knowledge base.
Man but we’ve come a long ways.
And I wonder what this profession will look like in another 10 years. :)
Posted by Jon on 4 December, 2006 under Processes & best practice |
I thought I’d share a couple of websites that I’ve discovered recently, that might come in handy for proposal folks out there.
The first is an excellent free image library, Stock.XCHNG . Some of their images have download restrictions, but most are free-to-use. There are some excellent photos up there – well worth exploring if you need some new illustrations for your documents.
The second is perhaps more esoteric. Lorem Ipsum is a site that can generate dummy text in Latin. As the site explains:
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.
Not only does it have the standard passage that’s widely used (“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua”), but it also has a couple of alternative passages from Cicero, and allows you to generate new text of any given length. Again, it might just come in handy for some of you out there.
