Jon and B.J.'s Proposal Blog
Posted by Jon on 29 June, 2009 under Word play & writing | 
1 Comment
At the risk of sounding like an old fogey: does anyone else hate the word, “Whatever!”, usually uttered dismissively by younger folks?
You can picture proposal teams ten years hence, when the awful phrase has crept into everyday business usage:
Requirement – “You will resolve at least 99% of problems within one hour.”
Answer – “Whatever.”
Posted by BJ on 19 June, 2009 under Word play & writing | Add your comment
I recently came across a small piece in the New Yorker, excerpted from the Wall Street Journal, that demonstrates how easy it is for something in writing to have various meanings and often, humorous consequences for the unintended meaning to be very humorous, and quite distracting.
In this article, Andrew Concors, a physical therapist and certified industrial ergonomist at San Diego-based CPT consulting, is speaking about the use of a ‘gym ball’ instead of a chair. No doubt you’ve come across someone in an office sitting on one of these things. The gym ball, also known as a Swiss ball, is said to better for your posture, physical well being, etc, than sitting on a chair.
Andrew points out that the gym balls are not without risk, stating he is aware of several patients who have ruptured their balls while sitting on them. Ouch!
Posted by Jon on 17 June, 2009 under Musings | 10 Comments
Vic, my wife, has recently taken to using Twitter, currently very much the ‘in’ thing amongst her circle of friends.
For those of you not in the know, Twitterers (twits?) send short text messages from their phones to the website, describing what they’re up to at any given moment in time. Frankly, I don’t really get it: I can survive without knowing what folks are up to on a hour-by-hour basis.
Yet it has provoked me to ponder the potential of this and other technologies to help when developing proposals. With the right security, it might really cool if all of those working on a proposal team had a window in the corner of their PC, in which messages popped up at regular intervals from others on the team. (”Just heard from the customer that…”; “Don’t forget to…”; “Anyone know how…”; “I’ve just had a good idea…”).
Twittering? Instant messaging? A blog open to all those working on the deal? Anyone out there already using these or other collaborative technologies to share information quickly between the members of the team working on a proposal?
Posted by Jon on 11 June, 2009 under Musings, Word play & writing | Add your comment
From a salesperson in a learning review last week:
“I don’t feel that we lost it, we just didn’t necessarily win it.”
No. You were the incumbent. The customer came out to tender. Your main competitor now holds the contract.
You lost.
Posted by Jon and BJ on 8 June, 2009 under Proposal Guys news | 3 Comments
About half of our readers will already have noticed our new design here at The Proposal Guys. The rest of you – those who subscribe by email or our RSS feed – might well want to head over to the site to have a look.
We’re tried to make it easier to navigate the site. So if you’re interested in reading about, for example, “Processes & best practice”, you can click on a link to see all of our past posts in that category. There’s a search bar – on the right hand side of the grey bar at the top of the page. And we love getting comments – links to your recent entries are now in the sidebar, so you can follow and join in the debate.
We hope you like the new look! Do let us know what you think – and if you’ve not posted anything before, feel free to leave a comment on this post saying “hi”: it’s always lovely to know who’s reading the blog and what you like about it.
Posted by Jon on under Musings | Add your comment
Sometimes a simple word just isn’t good enough for a proposal: your content contributors feel the need to reach for the thesaurus and seek out some extra-flowery alternative.
Take one recent document we reviewed. Apparently, should they win the contract, the supplier’s staff will conduct regular “client visitations” to the customers’ offices.
Having checked the Oxford English Dictionary, I assume they mean this in the context of ‘1. an official or formal visit’. Yet in the context of this project, where creating a sense of partnership was all-important, an air of ‘formality’ isn’t at all what the bidder was seeking to convey.
Moreover, most people would associate a ‘visitation’ with the alternative definitions:
2. the appearance of a divine or supernatural being.
3. a divorced person’s right to spend time with their children in the custody of a former spouse.
or
4. a disaster or difficulty regarded as a divine punishment.
None sounds like the proposed meetings would be a joy, although they may be eerily close to the truth of some customer-supplier meetings I’ve attended in the past.
Perhaps they simply meant ‘visit’ – so maybe that’s what they should have written! Proposal managers always need to remind contributors of some of the basic rules of good proposal writing – and encouraging them to keep it simple should certainly be on the list.
Posted by BJ on 6 June, 2009 under Musings | 1 Comment
No doubt, many of our readers will be aware of ‘apps’ for the iPhone. These are applications that allow a user to different things, ranging from useful (locating your car in a parking lot or finding a nearby restaurant), to fun (games such as Scrabble, Tetris and the usual assortment of other games) to the silly (turn your phone into a virtual lighter, complete with variable, flickering flame that the user can blow out).
I heard about a new app today. This app is called RunPee. What this app does is identify the moment or moments in a movie where the person viewing the movie can leave to use the bathroom and not miss something critical to the movie. It goes even further, providing information as to what the person might have missed. In my opinion, this is pure genius and clearly demonstrates the concept of determining what a person might need and then providing it.
An, as most things do, this got me to thinking about proposals and wondering what I would like to be able to do from my iPhone as relates to proposal work.
I have a few ideas, but before I present mine, I’d love to hear from our readers as to the app they’d like to see.
