While watching American Idol (yes, I watch it and I admit it. And I’m convinced anyone who claims not to is just afraid to admit that they do!), I noticed something about the way the judges, Randy, Paula and Simon (you all know who these people are at this point so I won’t elaborate here), deliver their feedback after an individual has performed.

If Randy likes a performer/performance, he gets very excited and it shows. He says things like, “You blew me away dawg.” or “I’m million percent positive.” If he doesn’t like a performance, he’ll deliver his opinion in a very sensitive and caring manner and it’s obvious he’s trying his best not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Paula on the other hand, always has something positive to say, no matter how poor the performance. She finds something she can comment on to make the person feel good, even if it’s the color of that person’s socks. She delivers a negative opinion with lots of reasons for the person to be positive. When she likes a performance, she positively gushes and is effusive with her praise.

Then there is Simon, the judge everyone loves to hate. Whether his opinion is positive or negative, Simon is always direct, succinct and very matter-of-fact. His expression is most often one of consternation, as if he expects the performance to be extremely poor. On those rare occasions that he likes a performer, he might almost smile.

So, what’s all this got to do with proposals? Well, it strikes me that this panel of judges is not unlike evaluation teams I’ve seen or of which I have been a member. An evaluation team is made up of individuals, all of whom have their own opinions and styles.

There’s usually a member that’s an “easy marker”. This type of evaluator will allow lots of leeway. Then there’s the completely positive type that seems to like everything and anything. And of course, evaluation teams often have their version of Simon. That is, someone who expects to only see poor quality proposals and is already in a negative mindset at the outset.

Whether it’s as a member of an evaluation team, within a workshop or while presenting feedback from an assessment, Jon and I have very different styles when it comes to delivering feedback, as those who know us well can attest. I tend to fall into the Randy mold, as I deliver negative feedback as gently as I can and do my best to not hurt a responder’s feelings. Anyone who knows Jon will probably agree he’s a bit more like Simon. That is, he’s more direct and a bit more “tell it like it is.” I can’t help but think there’s also something to do with my being American and Jon, like Simon, being British. (If we have a Paula on our team, it’s either Graham or our writer Jen.)

There’s something to be gained and learned from each type of evaluator, and it’s important that we know that there are all types of “judges” on evaluation teams.

Stay tuned for part two.

I love collecting quotes – especially really cynical comments! Here are a few that might provoke a rueful smile for those involved in proposal development:

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas. (Was he writing about some procurement teams?)

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” - Abraham Lincoln. (He’d obviously just read the draft text from a subject matter expert!)

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright. (No, surely not a comment on some account managers!)

“He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson. (Yep, I’ve worked on proposals with more than a few folks who’d fit that bill).

“He had delusions of adequacy.” – Walter Kerr. (Where do we even start?)

And my personal recent favourite?

“If all the experts tell you to go right, and you decide to go left, you’re probably stupid. But if you get lucky, and discover a pot of gold along the stupid path, people will call you a leader. You’ll still be stupid, but fewer people will feel the need to point that out.” - Scott Adams

British cookery expert Delia Smith returned to book stores with a new tome last week after a five-year gap, during which her pre-eminence has been challenged by usurpers such as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson.

The Observer noted that dictionaries now contain the phrase ‘the Delia effect’, to represent the phenomenal growth in sales for products endorsed on her shows. In one spectacular example:

“when she described a ten-inch metal pan as ‘a little gem which will serve you for a lifetime of omelette-making’ , it rescued the struggling Lancashire firm which had been selling only 200 of the pans a year. Lune Metal Products had to take on extra staff to make 90,000 new pans in just four months.”

I’m prompted to think about the obvious parallel in the proposal world. We all know the importance of quoting references, customer quotes, benchmarking data and analyst comment to endorse our capabilities, and thus strengthen the credibility of our story.

Yet all too often, getting hold of such snippets is a real challenge - and it’s easy to blame others: “sales should sort out more case studies”; “product management should find more nice quotes”. If you’re stuck in this rut, I hereby propose that you kick off ‘Project Delia’ immediately to establish the right roles, processes and rewards to break out of the cycle of frustration!

I’m guessing many of you will be familiar with the term “regift”. The term is used when a gift that has been received previously is then given to someone else and presented as a new gift.

I wasn’t familiar with this term until this past holiday season, during which I’m fairly certain I received a couple of ‘regifts’. I received gifts which had obviously not been chosen with my taste in mind and/or had obviously been given to someone else. One appeared to have been rewrapped in the same paper, which was quite crumbled and ripped when I received it. (Since I know you’ll ask, one was a “TacoMan Tortilla Maker” and the other was a “Hot Cocoa Set”.)

When I received these so-called gifts, I felt like I didn’t really matter to the people who gave them to me. I viewed their giving them to me as purely perfunctory and I felt that they had put no energy into thinking about what I liked or what I’d hope to receive. To me, they had expended the absolute minimum amount of energy necessary. The affect of receiving these gifts was such that I would have felt better had these people said, “Sorry, I didn’t get you anything.”

I can’t help but think a customer receiving a proposal that presents no value or benefits, is non-customer specific and largely cut and paste feels the same way.

I loved BJ’s post last Monday, in which he inadvertently found that he’d been editing a paragraph from the customer’s RFP – rather than from the draft proposal.

I still spend about 10% of my time working with purchasing teams. They find it fascinating to hear what happens on the bidding side of the table, and I personally like to keep in close contact with the way that buyers think and operate. And if I can persuade one or two sourcing teams that they need to write better RFPs, then it might make life easier for some proposal folks out there!

It’s a long hard slog, though, trying to persuade buyers that what they’re doing when producing an RFP is an exact mirror image of what we’re doing in our proposal teams. Their process logically includes:

• Pre-RFP preparation (building their team, developing their project plan, positioning their requirements with the market to ensure that the right suppliers do bid)
• Developing their strategy (“What are our real needs? How do we want to position this with bidders?”)
• Working out the structure of their document (“How can we make sure we get the right information in a format that’s easy to evaluate?”)
• Designing their content (“What questions do we need to ask, and why? What would good answers look like?”)
• Developing their content (collating information from different content experts, and melding it together to ensure consistency of tone and content)
• Producing a professional-looking document that presents their opportunity appropriately to the RFP’s recipients
• Gaining final sign-off from relevant stakeholders before the RFP is issued to the market.

Problem is, they don’t really (by and large) see it as a process. And when they don’t treat it as a process, they don’t understand the skills associated with doing it well – least of all, any professional writing or design skills, as mentioned in some of the comments on BJ’s post. So it’s left to the purchasing manager (frequently untrained in the art of developing RFPs) to cut and paste from past questionnaires, and to issue documents that veer between inconsistent and incoherent, whilst often feeling a sense of desperate isolation from business stakeholders who don’t want to get actively involved until the proposals are in.

Done well, mind, the benefits to the buyer are immense: we’ve seen this whenever we’ve helped procurement teams with their RFPs and subsequent evaluations. They receive far higher-quality proposals from their suppliers. So much better for the evaluators to be able to choose between a selection of truly excellent proposals, than to play a confrontational game that inevitably results in poor documents articulating unnecessarily weak, costly and risky solutions from ill-informed bidders. They find the transition from contract to implementation much smoother. And they find it far easier to manage the debrief process, as even losing suppliers confirm that they recognise the quality and fairness of the process they’ve just been through.

More on this shortly – our Proposal Guys panel is working on advice for those developing RFPs, and we’ll share their thoughts next week.

It seems that I can’t even read a magazine these days without hitting what I refer to as “speed bumps”. You know what I mean, those errors that, though not overtly corrupting the text, cause you to mentally stumble while reading. While reading the latest issue of Longboard Magazine, a periodical dedicated to surfers who prefer longer boards, I hit a few of these.

One example was within an ad for a surfboard which stated, and I quote, “It turns smooth and nose-rides ridiculously good.” Did that cause you to stumble? If not, I suggest you might want to take a refresher course in grammar.

I also stumbled when I came across a profile of a surfer which showed this individual as having been born April 13, 1983 and stated he was a freshman in high school. So either this guy is really slow or the date was meant to be 1993.

On the positive side, I also came across some excellent writing within this particular magazine. Again coming from an advertisement, I liked the way a particular ad had a closing statement for each paragraph. This ad, for the new Super Fish XL, should you have an interest, has statements such as, “You will kick yourself for not getting one sooner”, “You will love the speed and handling in turns” and “It really comes alive in small to medium waves”.

That same ad did some ghosting of the competition, that being shorter boards. It read,

“Most people are waking up to the fact that they are riding boards that are too short or too thin for them. Smaller boards just don’t have the buoyancy needed to float the rider, making it hard to get the board up to speed and difficult to catch a wave.”

Good value and benefit statements, good counter to the alternative.

Have you come across a speed bump while reading something other than a proposal lately? We’d love to hear about it. We’d also like to hear about any examples of excellent writing that provides examples for us proposal folks to follow.

Two non-proposal clippings that might entertain, and which seemed vaguely relevant…

The first, a letter in the Guardian recently, offering a lesson in the misuse of pre-written content:

The second, rediscovered in my files the other day as I scurried round looking for papers to complete my tax return - a perfect example of the need for peer review before publication:

While editing a response to an RFP and well into “editing” mode, I came upon a paragraph which was very poorly written, unclear and needed a complete rewrite.

I did just that. I took the time to understand what the paragraph was really trying to say. I then rearranged the order of the information, restructured several of the sentences and completely rewrote others. When I was done, I would say, at the risk of sounding conceited, that the paragraph was much clearer and easier to understand, and it was written well and correctly.

It was only after I had completed this exercise that I realized the paragraph was part of the RFP and not the response. As Charlie Brown would say, “Arrrrgggh!” Maybe this has happened to you. You have become so caught up in editing or worked with an RPF that was so poorly written, that you’ve inadvertently edited the RFP. Please tell me I’m not the only one who’s done this. (And yes, sadly, this is not the first time it’s happened to me.)

I would point out that any one who has a bit of time in the proposal game has surely come across an RFP that was poorly written and very unclear. Such RFPs, and the one I’ve described above in particular, would have benefited greatly from some of Jon’s expertise in developing effective RFPs. As he’s said many a time to a buyer (and this is also the name of a course Jon presents), “You get the response you deserve.”