Posted by Jon under Musings | 
Our good friends Dan Peel and Martin Smith of Bid Solutions, the leading recruitment agency for bid/proposal folks, are training hard for the New York marathon on 2 November.
Their fundraising tally has already reached £2000, with the proceeds going to the British Heart Foundation. They’re hoping to raise that to £5000 before the race.
We’ve sponsored them, and I offered to mention their efforts here: they’d love it if a few ‘Proposal Guys’ readers were able to add their support! If you are able to help, just click on their sponsorship page and you can help them towards their ambitious target.
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing |
A favorite comic strip of mine is “Get Fuzzy” (Darby Conley). A recent strip featured Bucky (a cat) speaking (hey, this is the comics after all!) to his owner Rob (aka – Evil Slavemaster in Bucky terms) about a food review he had just written. The fact that the strip was about food and the brilliant (even if somewhat silly…ok, very silly!) use of words, made me think of Jon (foodie that he is!).
In the strip, Bucky offers Rob a taste (pun intended I’m sure) of a couple of reviews. Enjoy.
“I give it two thumbs down…my throat to get rid of this junk.”
Nice, huh?
“I laughed. I cried. It touched me intestinally.”
I can just hear Jon saying those very words. ☺
Posted by Jon under Musings |
We have an idiom in the UK that one should:
“look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves”
This loosely translates as “if you look after your money carefully, you’ll get rich.”
It struck me recently that the opposite probably holds true for proposal centres.
Looking after the pennies? That suggests that your senior management are continually looking to shave money from your proposal operations. It’ll be an uphill battle to secure investment (”travel’s frozen, we’ve needed a new printer for months, and we can’t get funding for training”). It’ll all be about improving efficiency, rather than effectivess. Your energies will be diverted away from trying to win, in favour of trying to economise, to cut corners and to “make the most of a bad job”. And the quality of your proposals – and hence your win rates – will inevitably be being compromised.
You need to find a sponsor who “looks after the pounds, rather than worrying about the pennies.” Focus your senior exectives on the revenue (and margin) improvement opportunities that will derive from improving your proposals, rather than on the penny-pinching. They’ll probably only need to win one extra deal per year to pay back any investment you could dream of requesting.
Posted by BJ under Musings |
One of the books I’ve read recently is “Topgrading for Sales: World-Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives” by Bradford D. Smart, PhD. and Greg Alexander. (I also just finished “Boomsday” which I’ll tell you about in another post soon!).
To paraphrase one of the quotes on the book’s back jacket reads, “The most valuable management skill a person can have is the ability to produce high-talent teams.” The same definitely holds true for proposals. “It’s about the people and the team.”
This very readable book presents a process for hiring the best possible sales reps. It teaches the reader how to hire top talent, coach others to become top talent and also how to “weed out” poor performers before they do damage. I think the latter probably hits home with many of us.
Having done a fair amount of hiring over the years, I found the questions presented for use during interviews to be very interesting. These questions really “dig deep” and get at the real issues. Being a “process guy” I also liked the “step-by-step” approach throughout the book.
As a proposal professional, I found it most interesting to understand better what makes for great sales people. I also found many of the concepts, processes and questions to be very relevant to proposal and will modify and us the process for future hiring of proposal team members.
I’m not sure of all the outlets where Topgrading for Sales can be found but I do know it’s available through Amazon.com and additional info can also be found at its website.
*Who said it? 20 points for the name of the show, 30 for the actor’s name. 50 points for the character’s name.
