Posted by Jon under Musings | 
Proposal teams always talk about the need to appeal to the interests of all members of the evaluation team. And, of course, said team is likely to be multi-disciplinary in nature – comprising representatives of each of the business functions with an interest in the decision and the solution.
There was an interesting illustration of this principle in a discussion recently with a senior purchasing manager. He talked about a recent evaluation, where three bidders were in contention for a particular contract. Bidder A came out clearly on top of the scoring with half of the evaluators; the other half of the team were passionately in favour of Bidder B. Needless to say, Bidder A’s fans hated Bidder B, and vice versa.
The result? Bidder C won – fully capable of delivering the solution, liked by all of the evaluators (but loved by none) – and second in everyone’s scoring… Of course, you’d really want to come top of the table with everyone – but it’s the illustration of the importance of appealing to all of the evaluators that struck me as a particularly pertinent lesson.
Posted by BJ under Proposal Panda |
The Proposal Panda arrived safely in the U.S. earlier this month. He visited with the Strategic Proposal staff in New Hampshire and with me and my family for a few days. Though tired from the overseas journey and from the hassles at customs, he was in good spirits, tolerated having pictures taken with various individuals, including my dog Jack and Diane Loudenback’s daughter Julia (both Jack and Julia expressed a desire to keep Panda here for a while longer!) and seemed to enjoy the visit.
Panda is on a mission to visit as many proposal groups as possible before heading back to the U.K. after the annual APMP conference in June. On the itinerary at this point are stops in Texas, Illinois, Washington, Missouri and Tennessee (And no Robin, you can’t keep him. You have to send him on his way after the visit.) Panda is still taking invitations.
From our offices, Panda was sent on to visit with the 24 Hour Company in Virginia. I hear from Mike P. that Panda was a big hit in the office. Watch for a write up on Panda’s visit from the 24 Hour staff soon. From the 24 Hour Company offices, Panda will head for Missouri and a vest with our good friend Marlene (Careful Panda, Marlene’s a ‘hugger’! ☺)
Posted by Jon under Musings |
What is it with hotel TV these days? I switched on the set after checking in the other day, and was faced with a complex menu of options, offering me:
Parental control
Language
1 TV & Movies
2 Music & Radio
3 Internet
4 Adult
5 Special Offer
6 Pause-Stop-Play
7 Guest Services
All services for one price of £18.99
Charged on your bill as Communication Services
Novotel Hotels
Now, all I wanted to do was to watch the TV. So I found the right option, and found my way to the BBC News channel.
Then I went out for dinner. I came back to the room, and thought I’d check the late evening news before going to bed. On with the TV set. And guess what? There was the menu again.
The following morning, waking up? Yep, the menu. After breakfast? You guessed it. Arriving back from running a course the following day? Why, I hadn’t seen the menu for a while…
I know they want to make money from me. But this is a triumph of supplier-centric thinking – the inability to understand my preferences, as the customer, and to provide content that meets my needs. They clearly think it’s more important to push their various products in the hope I’ll give in and they’ll make some money from me. “Hey, I don’t want to watch the news after all. Let’s go for some Communication Services.”
I see a fair few proposals that follow the same principles: let’s list our products, rather than finding ways to respond to the customer’s requirements. And the frustration for the buyer is similarly increased as the the chances of them making a purchase declines.
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing |
This following response was sent into us by one our readers.
“ABC company will benefit from our firm’s expensive experience in successfully implementing this type of program.”
This is an excellent example of a misspelling which spell check wouldn’t catch. Or perhaps this response is just extremely honest.
Posted by Jon under Musings |
I have a new favourite website: anyone else come across Wordle? Here, for example, is a pictorial illustration of our posts at The Proposal Guys over the past (nearly) three years:
That’s rather fun. But let’s play with the proposal-specific applications here. Here’s a Wordle of the content of an RFP that I wrote back in my purchasing days (with a few words taken out to protect confidentiality):
See how easy it would be to drop your customer’s requirements document into this, and get a view of their pet phrases and key issues?
And, of course, it’s great for reviewing your draft proposals. At a glance, you can see whether you’re talking more about your own organisation than the customer; you can see whether your key themes are coming through strongly; you can compare the language used in different sections of your proposal; you can see how your language matches the map you made earlier of the customer’s RFP.
It does get rather addictive – especially since you can play with colour palettes, layout, text orientation and suchlike. Here’s a final picture – showing the words in the APMP accreditation syllabus. This one taught me that a little “playing around” is sometimes needed – for example, the phrase ‘the candidate should’ appears in almost every line of the APMP document, and it contains numerous codes, so I deleted these before creating the picture. It suggests that the most important things are that we understand the management and development of a proposal for a customer – pretty much spot on, I think, although I wish the word “winning” was more prominent!
You can create you own Wordles by going here. Have fun!
