A design team recently presented me with samples of some new proposal binding and packaging. I immediately dropped one of the ring binders onto the floor. “May I?”

They looked at me, concerned. I proceeded to tell the story.

Some years ago, I facilitated the evaluation workshops for a major IT procurement for a leading financial services institution. We gathered the evaluators together in the executive suite at Murrayfield, home of Scotland’s national rugby team.

One bidder’s proposals had started to come apart before it reached us: pages were falling out of the somewhat crushed ring binder. I well remember struggling up the cold staircases on the outside of the stadium, balancing their fragile documents as best I could.

I can still feel the moment that the ring binder started to disintegrate completely in my hands. I can picture the pages of that bidder’s proposal, floating away in the wind and the rain, in the general direction of Glasgow.

Needless to say, we didn’t trek across the muddy training pitch to retrieve them. I’ve never since underestimated the importance of packaging and binding for proposals. And I put any collateral to what I now term ‘The Murrayfield Test’: if I stand on it, does it survive the experience?

Greetings from Savannah, Georgia, where the 18th APMP Annual Conference is now well underway. As ever, it’s been great to catch up with so many old friends, and to meet new ones.

I’m absolutely delighted to be able to congratulate BJ on his election this morning as a Fellow of APMP. Fellowship honours those who have made an outstanding contribution to the proposal profession, and BJ’s award could not be more richly deserved.

We also picked up an award recognising our achievement in attaining APMP’s Approved Training Organization status.

Meanwhile, BJ and I have been putting the finishing touches to the presentation we’ll be giving in the main hall on Friday morning, “The Church of Proposal Excellence”. No doubt we’ll share excerpts here in due course – look out for the Seven Deadly Proposal Sins and Proposal Heaven & Proposal Hell, amongst other topics.

My local paper had an article on a woman who applied for a job at our minor league baseball park.

At the time that she applied this woman was over 65 years of age, she had no relevant experience, had only ever worked part time jobs and was just looking to get a job selling tickets. “I thought it would be fun. I also knew I didn’t stand a chance of getting the job on my very limited resume alone and that I needed to do something to catch their attention.”

This very clever woman decided to create and include that standard of baseball culture, a baseball card. She included this along with her resume and it did the trick. The hiring manager commented: “We wouldn’t have considered her at all except for her having included the card. It showed us she was creative, had a sense of humor and that she had initiative.”
Now 73, this woman has been with the baseball park for several years and runs the office for them.

So, what are you doing to set your proposals apart for all the others?

I’ve had the pleasure of spending the past few months building and running a proposal centre for a large financial services company – an ‘interim’, ‘part time’ assignment that’s been tremendously enjoyable. (Hey, at times I’ve almost felt like a regular commuter - same train, same seat. I knew I’d been doing this for a while when I forgot my ticket one morning, and the conductor told me that it wasn’t a problem as he recognised me!)

The team’s now in place: their new manager’s poised to take over the reigns. And so, before setting out for the office on my last day of formally running the team, I just wanted to say a public thank you to them for a tremendously enjoyable few months. Good luck! I’m really proud of what you’ve achieved so far, and know you’ll go on to do even greater things - and have fun doing so! 

I’ve been working with a team lately who’ve been in the early stages of discussion with a client about a very major opportunity - think ten typical deals added together, then add some.

They’re doing all the right things at this stage - building up trust with the client’s decision-makers, shaping the requirements in our favour. Their best guess is that this influencing phase has another couple of months to run.

“So let’s start talking about the proposal effort,” says I.

“But their RFP won’t be out for ages yet.”

Cue a workshop looking ahead to the proposal phase, involving a core team of senior managers. As I explained it, “At some point we’re going to have to get serious about this - and I don’t want that to be once the RFP’s arrived.”

So we’re now off identifying and talking to the probable contributors. We’re trying to secure war room space. We have experts assessing our lilkely competitors. We’re booking a strategy session, and a stakeholder analysis meeting (”I want everyone who’ll evaluate the proposal to be favourably disposed to our cause”).

We’re working out what content we can pull together before an RFP lands. We’re lining up internal stakeholders. We’re making sure that we are definitely going to bid - perish the thought that the qualification decision happens so late that we waste resources, or don’t secure resources soon enough, or mislead the client.

We’re building a plan as to how we’ll manage the proposal when the client does press ‘go’, and making sure everyone understands what will be needed. We’re trying to inject a will to win in the whole team.

Will we win? I have no idea yet, although you can bet I’ll do everything I can to help the team to do so. And it’ll be so much easier if we don’t start off on the back foot.

The author of a recent AP article likens the shape of the island the article references to that of a “spark plug”.

Now, I happen to know what shape a spark plug is (as I’ve changed a few in my day) but I’m pretty sure Jon wouldn’t (and I’m guessing he wouldn’t know they need to be changed or, God forbid (I can see him trembling to think of such a thing), has actually ever changed one himself. :)

As I read this I couldn’t help but wonder what percentage of the people reading that article would know what a spark plug is shaped like (without doing a quick search on the web!)

I think this is something we need to consider when we use comparisons or analogies in our responses. To work, the basis of comparison used has to be something to which we’re confident the majority of the readers/reviewers can easily relate.

Say what you will about Tony Blair – and, frankly, I’d rather you didn’t say much after we’ve been drowned in media reflections on his ten years in office over the past week – but the man’s a superb orator.

I was driving to the South-East last week when he gave his resignation speech. As regular readers will know, I’m always fascinated by political quotes that have proposal relevance. Two of Blair’s passages particularly echoed with me: the first discussed how “decision-making is hard”:

“Doubt, hesitation, reflection, consideration and re-consideration – these are all the good companions of proper decision-making. But the ultimate obligation is to decide.”

The second phrase explored the high expectations people had had of his government when it came to power:

“So, of course, the vision is presented in the colours of the rainbow, and then the reality is sketched in the duller tones of black, white and grey.”

I could sense the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations reaching for their pens as he spoke… and saw obvious parallels with our world as proposal professionals.

A good friend of ours sent us this response to an RFP question (and I could hear her infectious laughter as I read it!) Italics have been added to the question for your enjoyment.

The RFP question:

If your administration office(s) were to be destroyed in a hurricane, where would you relocate, what functions would be resumed in 24 hours, 72 hours, and 1 week?

The response:

(Company name, withheld to protect the embarrassed) would only be mildly inconvenienced if a tornado were to hit the building.

The Times recently presented extracts from the latest book by Robert Sutton, a professor of management science. His new theory is called “The No A**hole Rule”.*

Apparently, so the new theory goes, it’s important at work to:

‘distinguish people who are having a bad day or a bad moment (”temporary a**holes”) from persistent nasty and destructive jerks (”certified a**holes”).’

I offer this up partly for your amusement, but also with a cynical view that it could prove useful when categorising team members on some proposal efforts!

*The newspaper uses asterisks throughout the article - then, oddly, quotes the book’s title in full. I’ve gone for the tamer version, to spare the blushes of our more delicate readers!

Researchers have discovered that we have two distinct types of “attention” (and actually use different parts of our brains to process each.) One type is the one we use when we are focused and anticipating what is coming next. The other is when something comes along unexpectedly and our focus is drawn to it.

To have the greatest impact, the proposals we develop have to address both types of “attention” of the reader/reviewer. We need to maintain the interest of those who are highly focused as they read/review our response and we have to capture the attention of those who are skimming it or flipping the pages.

This is why we so strongly emphasize the need for considering both the “information” (what the response says) and the “presentation” (how the information is presented) aspects in the development of strategic proposals.