Okay. this is hypothetical. So if you happen to know my wife, just because this may sound like something that might happen between her and I doesn’t mean it is about her and I. Okay?)

A man asks his wife in the morning, “How did you sleep?”

The wife responds, “I had a strange dream.

I was in a very large hot air balloon that fell into the sea and it sank very far under water and I was hanging on to the rails and trying to find you but then a dog with some kind of purple toy in its mouth swam over and I thought I could grab its tail and he would pull me out but when I did he tried to bite me and we sank even further but then we fell into a hole under the water and we were suddenly outside and we were completely dry and it was bright sunshine and we were sitting at a picnic lunch and you had already eaten and I was annoyed with you because you hadn’t waited for me to join you and you said you had waited and that I had called and said to start without me and I said I couldn’t have called you because I was in a hot air balloon and then I was under the water and I didn’t think cell phones worked under water and you said you were sorry and said you would sit with me while I ate. And while we were eating a man came by and asked if we had seen a hot air balloon go into the lake and I said yes we were on the balloon and explained how it had fallen into the sea and how the dog had tried to bite me and then how we had fallen into the hole and then found ourselves here at the picnic and I asked the man if he would like some lunch so I would have company while I was eating since you had already eaten.”

You’ll note that while I did receive a great deal of information when I asked my hypothetical wife “How did you sleep?” she didn’t answer the question I asked.

I’m guessing some of you have read or reviewed or even written proposal content that might be somewhat similar to this response.

I’m sure I have.

Some readers may be familiar with one of my pet phrases, a ‘Benedict Proposal’. Benedict’s my son: at the age of two, his first ever words were, “Me, me, me, me, me.” And the majority of proposals I see work on similar lines – they’re far more supplier-centric than customer-focused. After all, it’s much easier for a bid team to discuss their own organisation and its capabilities (”Me, me, me”) than it is for them to write about the customer!

The young gentleman in question is now seven – or, as he would phrase it, ‘almost eight’. He’s just demonstrated that his proposal skills are improving with age. His school is running an appeal to raise funds for a major extension to their buildings; to publicise this, they recently ran a competition in which each of the pupils had to submit a picture of a room that should be incorporated into the new block.

Benedict picked up one of the three prizes. His design? Well, the competition was being judged by the teachers. So a picture of a beautifully-designed, comfortable, superbly-equipped staff common room was always going to win, wasn’t it? Particularly when the other kids were all drawing state-of-the-art, Wii-filled play areas!

Talk about producing a submission that hits all of the evaluators’ hot buttons spot on, and differentiates your efforts from the competition! (And no, since you wonder, I didn’t have anything to do with it!).

We announced a few weeks ago that we’d be forming a Readers’ Panel here at The Proposal Guys, and we’re now delighted to introduce the panel members to you. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing the perspectives of a cross-section of proposal professionals from around the world.

They’ll be contributing thoughts every couple of months on topics of interest to our readers. (Feel free to send us your suggestions). The first topic we’ve asked them to consider is:

“What are the single most (a) frustrating and (b) rewarding aspects of proposals in your organisation?”

Check back in a few weeks’ time to hear their views! Our volunteers are as follows:

David Blume works for the Sant Corporation in the UK, a leading provider of proposal automation solutions. He has responsibility for sales and account management in a number of industry sectors across Europe including Asset Management, Insurance, IT, logistics, and telecommunications. David has nearly 20 years of international sales and management experience and has worked specifically in the field of sales effectiveness since 2001.

Lesa Camarri manages the RFP department for VSP Vision Care, a national employee benefits organization specializing in eye health care. She started out as the company’s only RFP specialist and over the past 15 years has built the proposal team to include eight full-time proposal specialists, one full-time editor, one full-time knowledge base manager and part-time administrative support. Lesa’s team responds to about 350 formal RFPs annually and they outsource fulfillment to a popular print-on-demand company.

Robin Davis began her career at Healthways Inc. eight years ago as an Administrative Assistant.  She quickly moved into a sales support position as a Manager that included responding to RFPs.  With no formal process in place, she developed and implemented a robust proposal and content management process that has grown exponentially since 2003.  As the company continues to grow and expand, her team has grown to 11 proposal and content management professionals who delivered over 250 proposals over the last year. 

Barbara Esmedina is Communications Manager for CONEXIS. She has more than 25 years RFP experience in both government (DoD) and commercial (healthcare) sectors. She is a long-time Pragmatech software user and APMP member. Barbara specializes in document automation, knowledge bases, online surveys, market research tools, and learning management systems.

Roisin McCorry works for Tata Consultancy Services, the Indian offshoring giant. She graduated five years ago, spending a year in Business Analysis and the subsequent four years in proposal management. She is responsible for all bids generated from the Insurance and Manufacturing verticals with the occasional foray into government, utilities, etc. “as a disaster recovery agent when things begin to go horribly wrong”. Roisin is currently based in Belfast, working from home, but she travels to the UK for 90% of her working time. She’s currently working towards the APMP Practitioner qualification.

Lisa S. is an assistant vice president and proposal team member with a global financial services firm in New York.  She has also held high-level proposal writing and content management roles in two additional industries over the last seven years. With more than 13 years of professional writing and communications experience and a Master of Fine Arts in writing, her publications extend beyond proposals and into the journalistic and literary realms.

Jeff Scurry is the North American Proposal Manager for Baker & McKenzie and has a very keen interest in all facets of proposals, business development and professional services marketing. Previously Jeff led Grant Thornton’s National Proposal Center. Prior to Grant Thornton, Jeff was with KPMG Corporate Finance LLC. He received his bachelor of science in organizational behavior from Northwestern University.

Thanks in advance to each of them for their support and their input.

* Yes, we know that ‘panellista’ isn’t a real word, but it should be, don’t you think?

I noticed a sign at Heathrow that read as follows:

“At shift’s end and prior to departing, employees will check that all 310 doors are closed and locked.”

I’d be curious as to if and how anyone has ever accomplished this task.

Yes, upon rereading it I did get it. So here’s a challenge for all you writers out there. How would you rewrite this notice to ensure clarity and understanding?

Also, this should cause us to reflect on whether the instructions we proposal people send out to our respective teams are clear and easy to understanding.

Somewhat at the last moment, I was handed the honour of opening last week’s UKAPMP conference in Bournemouth with my presentation on “The Proposal Top Ten”, in which I helped the audience to benchmark their proposal capabilities.

I was followed onto the stage by David Magliano, Marketing Director for the winning 2012 London Olympic bid. Of all his fascinating anecdotes, what really stuck in my mind was the preparation that went into the team’s final presentation to the Olympic decision-makers. London had six speakers, each talking for three minutes. In case one of these fell ill, they’d also lined up a substitute who could jump in to replace any of the six (putting across the same key messages, but swapping in his own personal anecdotes for those of the original speaker).

The team leaders had watched the tape libraries to study every single presentation from the previous 12 years of Olympic bids. They created a replica of the presentation suite, so the speakers were familiar with the set-up in advance.

By the time they presented, they’d reached version 35 of the script. They’d had 10 rehearsals as a group, and each speaker had 20 hours of individual coaching.

Now, most of us aren’t involved in bids of that scale, and couldn’t afford to invest the time or costs associated with that degree of planning. But it does throw down a challenge – are your bid teams rehearsing their presentations, or simply turning up and hoping that it’ll be alright on the day?

PS how wonderful to see an audience of 220 at the conference – huge credit to the organisers, including Mike, Pat, Ian, Richard and Frances.

To get my brain in gear each morning I do the “Jumble” in the newspaper. Many of you will be familiar with this puzzle and I suspect some of you probably do it on a regular basis.

For those of you who are not familiar with the puzzle, the task is to unscramble each word. Then, using the letters within each of the squares, unscramble the words to solve the riddle at the bottom.

I’ve created a puzzle using proposal terms. Enjoy.

Why the hard-of-hearing proposal manager put the proposal on the top shelf?

A rare foray into a McDonald’s the other night. Yes, I know, but my son likes it – and I’m quite fond of their hot apple pies! Eating one of said pies, I was struck by the nutritional information on the packaging:

OK, there’s a prize for anyone who can tell me exactly what each of these symbols means, without looking at their website.

Graphics are supposed to simplify, to make things clearer, to be readily understandable. These do the opposite, obfuscating the information – as indeed do many proposal graphics, which merely serve to further complicate the already-confusing. (The old adage is “a picture tells a thousand words”, yet we often see overly-complex diagrams better described by “a picture full of a thousand words”).

On reflection, by the way, I thought that maybe the restaurant’s designers had originally come up with a much simpler colour-coding system, that would have been thrown out at the committee stage:

• Red: eat lots of these and you will die very young
• Amber: eat lots of these and you will die younger than you should
• Green: eat lots of these and a long life will be yours, my friend.

I caught a commercial on the radio today introducing a new doctor at the local hospital. The commercial closed with the doctor stating, “I treat all my patients like you’d treat a member of your family.”

Okay. I understand the intent here…but I think you can easily see where this could be confusing or out of alignment with the listener’s thinking. (Oh sure, like I’m the only one with a few dysfunctional family members, right?)

As we all know and have heard many, many times, it’s all about understanding the client.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Executive Summaries for clients in different sectors lately. Both were well-written; they sought to restate the customer’s requirements succinctly, showing real insight, and they presented their respective organisations’ capabilities persuasively. Yet both fell short, for different reasons.

The first contained a list of bullets describing what claimed to be the compelling reasons to buy from the bidder concerned. Their approach would be “fully compliant”, their team had “proven experience”, they offered “unrivalled commitment” at senior levels and their solution would be extremely “cost effective”.

I was concerned. The list felt very “me too”: could I imagine a competitor submitting a proposal describing their non-compliant approach, delivered by an inexperienced bunch of recent graduates with little senior support, costing the earth?

But what really worried me was the lack of flow through into the remainder of the document. I applied a simple test, by searching on the key phrases from the stated ‘themes’. Lo and behold, they were notable by their absence. In nigh on 150 pages, the first mention of cost effectiveness came on page 127, and then only in an aside whilst discussing training. Management ‘commitment’ wasn’t referred to at all after the Executive Summary.

It seemed clear that the Executive Summary had been written after the fact, without a coherent overall vision for the proposal – rather like an artist painting a delicate watercolour of an eighteenth century rural scene, only to decide at the last moment to add in a pencil sketch of a spaceship in the far corner.

The second document fell into a slightly different trap. It was extremely well-written, creating empathy, offering great proof points and showing real differentiation. I fired through a few comments to the team, suggesting minor tweaks here and there. And then, not long after, I followed up with a second note on reflection:

By the way, do your three or four win themes really come through in this? There’s lots about the cool stuff you’ll do, but I’m not sure that the messages are quite as memorable as they might be. (Put another way, ten minutes on, I can’t remember what your themes are!).

If your strategy isn’t memorable – if the evaluators won’t read the book with your story clearly positioned in their minds – then it needs some further work and clearer articulation.

I came upon the following two ‘speed bumps’ in proposals recently. They literally stopped me in my tracks (reading wise).

“…the price of this is priceless.”

“…the diameter of which is 5 square yards.”

Are you confident that your content doesn’t contain any ‘speed bumps’?

If you’ve seen a good one lately please fell free to share it with us.