Posted by Jon on 30 April, 2008 under Musings | 
I mentioned earlier in the year that there’s some interesting academic research on the correlation between the order in which candidates appear in a contest, and the likely result. I’m not sure whether it applies directly to the world of bids and proposals, but it’s certainly given me some food for thought.
Wändi Bruine de Bruin of Carnegie Mellon University has written a couple of papers now on the theme “Save the last dance for me”. She’s studied the outcomes of figure skating competitions, the Eurovision Song Contest (!) and reviewed other research into contests as varied as gymnastics, classical music and synchronized swimming.
The results aren’t entirely clear cut, but some strong patterns do emerge which tend to back up our “last or first” philosophy.
Broadly speaking, if candidates are judged via a step-by-step approach – that is, each individual entrant is scored and discussed immediately after they’ve taken their turn – then the data suggests that it’s better to go last:
contestants who performed later in the sequence generally received better scores.
Judges compare each performance to its predecessors and “tend to overweigh the unique features of each new, focal, performance.” However, if an ‘end-of-sequence’ procedure is used, where “judges do not announce their scores until all contestants have performed”:
one may expect judges to give higher scores to contestants that are remembered better. Research on free recall suggests that first and last appearing options are more likely to be remembered.
Fascinating stuff: I’d love to see some research into bid presentations. Then again, proper planning, an effective content design process for the presentation, development of great collateral, a properly-managed rehearsal and careful choreography of the logistics all probably play a bigger part in improving your chances of success than the order in which you happen to present!
Posted by BJ on 28 April, 2008 under Interviews and the Panel |
Either “Run the other Way!” or “Watch and Learn”
Connie Sanford is well known and respected within the proposal community and has presented at many APMP conferences and Pragmatech User Forums. She told us she was enjoying the questions so much that she answered 7 of them instead of the usual 5. Here’s Connie input:
Please describe your current role?
I am the Manager of Proposal Services for Kforce Professional Staffing. I manage a team of 4 – 3 full time proposal writers and a developer for our automated documents. Annually, we review about 350 RFPs and were instrumental in adding $44 million in new revenue to the Firm last year. We support a field sales force of approximately 1,500. We also have 30+ automated documents for the field to use for smaller opportunities. They used the website to create more than 1,000 proposals in 2007.
How did you first get involved in sales proposals?
I finished my BA at the ripe age of 39 and took a job as a technical writer, which was really an RFP responder – I hesitate to call it a proposal writer because they only expected me to answer questionnaires (insurance company). I was a one-man show and had no idea what I was doing, but knew there had to be more than this. I looked around on the web and found APMP and they were just about to have their Salt Lake City convention. I asked to go and my boss approved it. I was intrigued by the presentation you guys (BJ and Jon) did and felt like I’d finally found a family of people who were like me. I learned about software like Pragmatech that could make my life and our company’s responses better. I became a proposal evangelist at that conference and haven’t stopped seeking better, building better and wanting more.
Any advice for proposal people needing to get greater sponsorship from senior colleagues within the business?
My advice would be to learn to speak their language. We are ‘word’ people – all of us think and speak and even dream in full sentences. Personally, I find it difficult to text because I can’t bring myself to leave out the punctuation or misspell the words. Your executives are probably not ‘word’ people; they are number people, statistics, ratios, win rates and return on investment. You must speak to them in those terms and make them understand that your department doesn’t just ‘do proposals.’ Your department reviews (for instance) 5 RFPs per person per week, resulting in 35% win rate. Each proposal takes about 20 hours and results in $500,000 in new business. That way they can begin to quantify your value to the Firm and justify your headcount, growth, your need to spend money to send the team to conferences, training sessions, pay for certification tests or anything else. It is our responsibility first to learn to speak to them before they learn to understand us.
Every proposal professional has a favourite horror story of the proposal that nearly (or actually) went wrong. What’s yours?
We did a proposal for a State a couple of years ago. We had just acquired a new company who was already doing business with the State, but the State wanted Kforce to win the bid not just sign over the old award. It was complicated and a large document with multiple copies but after weeks working with the folks from the new company and our organization, we got the document submitted. The State called us to say our headers were wrong. They had not mentioned the header requirement in the RFP, but we would need to reprint the proposals and send them in again. We completed and delivered the new documents only to receive a call from the State that they had posted an updated RFP on their website while we were working on the second version. We would have to comply with the new RFP and its format changes, language changes etc., which meant we had to review the old and new RFPs page at a time to catch all the changes. We submitted the third versions and then heard that our contact person had retired and we would be assigned a new reviewer, which would add months to the review cycle. It all worked out … we were awarded the business, but the entire process took 18 months. Our RFPs are usually released, responded and awarded within three months.
What one piece of advice would you offer to a newcomer just starting work on proposals?
I was reading these questions aloud to my team as I was contemplating which ones to answer. They all responded, in unison, “Run, run the other way.” That has to tell you something. Now, you have to understand, my team is the best – lots of experience, iron wills, strong backbones to deal with our constituency and loads of heart. Each is doing this because they want to. This is not an easy road. There’s no book to read, no degree to seek, finally we have some certification, but still each industry is so different, each of us has to be prepared to forge our own path. It’s not for the faint of heart. So, if the newcomer doesn’t heed, “Run!” I would have to say, “Watch and learn, don’t be afraid to ask and don’t be afraid to stand up when you know you are right.”
How did you come by your belief in the importance of proposals?
Many years ago I had occasion to request other vendors’ proposals through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) on a couple of municipalities. Even though the opportunities were for very different services, many of the vendors’ proposals were identical – word for word. Either the documents were wrong (in a couple of spots) or they were so vague, they resembled pre-printed marketing material. I knew we could do better, so I took the bad proposals to my boss to help him understand what the competition was doing and that we weren’t much better. We made some changes to our documents and won several of those new documents, got good feedback from brokers and that was enough to convince everyone else.
If you had to recommend one book to proposal managers, what would it be? (It doesn’t have to be specifically about proposals!)
Wow, there are lots of good books, but it doesn’t have to be a book. Last year, I completed Dale Carnegie’s Leadership Skills training, and it gave me so many new skills. I would recommend anything that helps you to be a leader and not just a manager. Frequently, we are ‘managing’ people who don’t need to be ‘managed.’ Our teams need to be led, encouraged, shown the way to make their jobs a career choice. They need help in creating a path to continually improve in that career. We need to go to bat for them with our superiors so they can get what they need to stay in those positions, providing important continuity to their Firms and their teams. That usually calls for more than a book.
“If buyers wrote good RFPs, they’d receive good proposals in return. In the meantime, they should stop complaining!” Discuss.
“If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their fannies.” It’s not my place to complain or lament that RFPs aren’t better, they are what they are. Lots of time they’re vague and redundant, but that’s why my team is valued – we can cut through the vagueness and the redundancy using the tools we have available from our experience. Regardless, it is the client’s game with their rules – period. It’s my job to make sure that we know those rules and if we don’t it’s my team’s responsibility to ask the necessary questions to position my Firm for a win.
Posted by Jon on 24 April, 2008 under Word play & writing |
Here’s the review of a restaurant called “Brussels Sprouts”, from the Luxe guide to Singapore.
The malty brews and steaming hot moules are must haves at this breezy bistro and bar. 01-12 The Pier, Robertson.
Excluding the address, that’s 16 words. The other guidebook I was using for reviews when I was there last year featured a description of the same restaurant that ran to 532 words, and said little more that would have helped me to decide whether or not to eat there.
Then there was the 20-word review of a trendy-looking fish place I wandered past:
Dress down and prepare to get messy. No Signboard Seafood is over-bright, noisy, bustly and famous for its white-pepper crab.
Again, I can pretty much get the gist of what the place is going to be like, and whether and when I might want to go. Now, I’m a fairly experienced traveller, and pretty used to finding places to eat in far-flung cities. Had I been a novice to overseas travel, or a less regular diner, I might have appreciated the extra detail. So writing to meet the needs of the reader is clearly key.
But I did think that this was a cool illustration of the power of succinct, sharp writing. And I’d hazard a guess that the writers at Luxe spent far longer polishing their twenty-or-fewer words than their competitors did over their five hundred plus.
Posted by BJ on 22 April, 2008 under Musings |
Anyone who has attended a workshop or a presentation that we’ve delivered has heard us speak about the need to use terms with which the customer is familiar, to be very careful with the use of jargon or industry terms and above all, to ensure the customer understands what it is you’re talking about.The need for this became very clear when I overheard a conversation recently between two children, a boy of 6 and a girl of 4.
The boy, very proudly, said to the girl, “I’m going with my family to the Bahamas.”
The girl responded by asking, “What’s a “Bahamas”.
Providing an example of what many of us will no doubt see as way too close to real life, the boy then responded, very sheepishly I might add, with “I don’t really know what a Bahamas is.”
Posted by Jon on 18 April, 2008 under Musings |
Whilst I’m talking about the national museum in Singapore (or, more particularly, its restaurant!), I was mesmerised by one of the exhibits, Suzann Victor’s “Contours of a Rich Manoeuvre 2006″.Eight red chandeliers hung from a high ceiling. To quote the museum’s description:
Installed at three metres above the floor of the bridge and one and a half metres apart, each chandelier swings across the bridge’s width in sequence or in a staggered pattern. The lights on each chandelier intensify to maximum brightness on the inward arch and dim on the outward arc.
Every time one emerged from one gallery, to walk to the next, the chandeliers had swapped to a different choreographed routine: ‘Pairs’, ‘Tattoo’, ‘In Rank’, ‘Helix’, each combination swinging for thirty minutes.
But then I found myself on the bridge, looking up, and the exhibit was still. “It’s broken,” was my first thought – and then I looked at the placard describing the artwork. There, it was explained that, twice per day, the chandeliers performed a half-hour “break”. And, rather remarkably, this sense of quiet-where-there-was-usually-motion inspired a very deep sense of peace, calm, stillness in the viewer.
For a proposal manager, one of the bravest things to do when working on a longer project is to know when to stand the team down – to make them take a break, to send them home, even though deadlines are looming. There’s the ever-present fear that “we must keep going” and “we must be seen to be working flat out”. Yet taking that downtime can do wonders for morale, motivation, energy, well-being – and creativity. And you’ll be amazed at how the team more than makes up in the following days for what some might see as ‘lost’ time, both in terms of their output and (more importantly) its quality.
Posted by BJ on 16 April, 2008 under Interviews and the Panel |
“Getting Graphic”
Please describe your current role?
I am a partner at 24 Hour Company, a firm that specializes in graphics for proposals. These days my primary role is the development of workshops and tools to share my best practices and secrets with proposal professionals. Previously I designed graphics and presentations for proposals, something I still do on occasion. I am committed to helping the proposal industry evolve and I recently released the third book in a series on graphics, Do-It-Yourself Billion Dollar Business Graphics.
How did you first get involved in proposals?
Reluctantly. Nine years ago I had a choice to make: a) become a partner at a multimedia firm or b) become a partner at a proposal graphics firm (24 Hour Company). “What’s a proposal?” was my first reaction. However, as I learned more about the proposal industry, I soon saw it as an underserved market. I knew it would continue to grow and mature, and I wanted to be a part of its growth. Part of my continuing to enjoy working on proposals is the adrenaline rush that comes with the pressure of working to a deadline, having to produce the highest-quality documents possible and competing.
What characteristics do you feel make for a first-class proposal?
Interdependence. The proposal team must work together and communicate properly. They must have a schedule and a plan and stick to it. I want everyone to be on the same page. For example, I want the Capture Manager, sales lead, or person closest to the future client to share what s/he knows with the proposal team (everyone on the team… not just key personnel).
Play to the individual’s strengths: A subject matter expert should not spend hours designing a graphic if they have a designer on their team. It would be a waste of the team’s time and money for a subject matter expert to make graphics when they could be focused on developing the solution or writing.
Compete to win, not just “let’s-just-go-for-it”. The work should start before the RFP is released with a rough sketch of the solution at a very high level that slowly gets down into the weeds (linking back to the high-level view of the solution) If the team can picture the solution, they will have a much better chance of effectively explaining it in writing. I have seen hundreds of times where once the team can visualize the solution, the writing comes easy and they tell a story that solves the future client’s problem.
Link features to benefits and discriminators. The proposal must be audience focused. It also needs to look like a first-class proposal-aesthetically appealing, no clip art, well formatted, consistent, and well edited.
In addition, a first-class proposal needs to be easy to evaluate and score and it needs to follow the RFP.
If you were given responsibility for a proposal center, what would you do first?
Talk to the team. I would have and schedule time for a free flowing conversation addressing specific areas and questions with the team to understand their wants, needs, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses. I would review their processes and systems, as well as the company’s products, services and offerings. Lastly, I would evaluate old proposals and find out what worked and what did not and why.
I would then develop a plan for developing and streamlining proposal development. I would get the team involved so everyone had ownership of our new process/system. I would also involve senior management in the process and get their input and support to help make changes as needed and get funding approved.
How do you respond to those who claim, “It’s all about price”?
Hockey Puck! If this were true the lowest cost solution provider would always win. RFPs from any U.S. government agency state that the proposal will be awarded to the company showing they can provide the “best value” not “lowest cost.”
Many proposals win because the sales representative or capture manager did a fantastic job developing rapport with the future client and learning their hot buttons and key issues (often not stated in the RFP), giving the team give an edge over the competition.
I’ve even heard stories of proposals winning because of the cover! One such story is of a military agency that needed a product built. Only one company had the product ready-to-go, and they put a picture of it on their proposal cover. Ironically, they almost lost because the proposal was so poorly written; however, they showed the product working on the cover so they won. In addition, their proposal had the highest cost.
What’s the worst (or funniest) proofreading error you’ve ever seen in a proposal?
“Jerminal Arena Destruct Limes.” It should have read: “Terminal Area Destruct Lines”
If you were to recommend one book to proposal managers, what would it be? (It doesn’t have to be specifically about proposals!)
I’d have to say, “Do-It-Yourself Billion Dollar Business Graphics: 3 Fast and Easy Steps to Turn Your Text and Ideas into Graphics That Sell.”
We asked over 400 proposal professionals what their biggest proposal challenges were and one of the top challenges listed was translating words and ideas into graphics. (I’m sure it sounds self-serving to recommend a book I’ve written but I know the value of the best practices and “secrets” in this book.)
I can’t stress enough the power of visual communication. Too many proposals are lost because the winning solution gets lost in a sea of words or is missed because the graphic is indecipherable. Visuals (even rough sketches) get everyone on the same page fast! Good graphics are proven to increase success rates by 43%. The book shows proposal professionals how to translate their winning solutions into a memorable, compelling graphics.
Posted by Jon on 14 April, 2008 under Musings |
I came across a receipt the other day from Novus, one of the better restaurants I enjoyed in Singapore way back in the autumn. It’s located in the national museum. To paraphrase the old advert for London’s V&A, which some of you may recall, the lunch in question was a rather odd case of an excellent restaurant with a decent museum attached.
Their menu was displayed outside the entrance; scanning it quickly, I focused in on one of the desserts: saffron ice cream. That in itself was sufficient reason to go in and dine – unusual, distinctive, so appealing that my taste buds were already starting to imagine the unusual flavour. (Had you shaped the evaluators’ opinions before they read your last proposal, so they expected yours to be wonderful? Did your front cover and table of contents create a compelling first impression?)
The first two courses were excellent (especially the poached quince), but I knew the highlight was to come. I scanned the dessert menu: there were some other great options, but only one drew me back, no matter how good the rest. (Did your last proposal do that for the evaluators?).
The dish duly appeared. And it disappointed. Not the saffron ice cream itself, which absolutely hit the spot – a flavour so intense yet delicate that my mouth’s watering as I write this some months later. (How memorable was your message?)
But it came served “with raspberry millefeuille, on a bed of chopped nuts”. Now, I love raspberries – but these were too succulent: they got in the way of the taste I was expecting to hear. And the only nuts I enjoy come with pints of beer or glasses of sherry: they too got in the way, jarred, left the wrong flavour in my mouth. (Did you focus on a clear message, or confuse your story with too much detail?)
Nevertheless, the ice cream itself had the wow factor. (Like your writing?) I emailed friends about it, sang its praises. (Did the evaluators do that about your proposal?)
That said, the meal was pricey by Singaporean standards. But you you can’t do saffron ice cream on the cheap, unless you want your customers to fall short of the high expectations you’ve created. And once I was sold on the concept, price became incidental. (So was your proposal so compelling that they chose you, then worried about the price?)
And I happened to be in the mood for fine dining. There are times when given the choice I’d be the one ordering a Mr Whippy with a 99 flake – from the ice cream van, in the park on a hot summer’s day, maybe. And offer eight-year-old Benedict a saffron ice cream…?! (And your story appealed to these evaluators, for this specific opportunity?).
Now, all this talk of restaurants is making me hungry…!
