Posted by Jon under Proposal Guys news | 
As you may have seen in a previous post, we’ve been running a survey over the past quarter into bid/proposal managers’ views of the RFPs that we receive from buyers. We’ve had a fantastic response to this, with significant numbers of contributors from across the world.
Our Dutch colleagues have now created an online version of the survey form, and we’ve extended the deadline until the end of December. So if you’d like your voice to be heard, please do click here and complete the survey online.
Posted by BJ under Word play & writing |
Believing that laughter is a magic ingredient and important for having a good day, my day often begins with a call from Mike P. (he of 24 Hour Company and Billion Dollar Graphics fame) or vise versa with me calling him. The purpose of our call being to share the latest ‘bit’ that either of us has heard and to provide each other a chuckle or two. These are sometimes one’s we’ve heard but that doesn’t matter. This let’s us both start our day with a bit of levity, laughter, silliness, word play, etc.
So I thought I’d share a few of our favorites. (As will be quite evident I’ve no doubt, we’re not terribly discerning, nor are we by any means high brow. But we do have our standards. We keep it clean and non-offensive, both of us knowing that the best humor doesn’t offend and isn’t done at the expense of another.)
A couple of the most recent ones Mike has shared with me:
Question: What did the green grape say to the purple grape?
Answer: Breathe.
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Two sausages are lying next to each other in a frying pan. As the pan heats up, one sausage turns to the other and asks, “Is it just me or is it getting warm in here?”
The other sausage responds with, “Wow. A talking sausage.”
One of my favorites (This is reputed to be one of Johnny Carson’s favorites and I suspect many of you will relate to it.):
On a swelteringly hot day, two hippos are in a river, only their eyes above the water. After an hour or so, one of the hippos slowly raises his head, turns to the other hippo and asked, “Is it really only Tuesday?”
We’re also both big on puns, word play etc. Here are a couple I like a lot and which I shared with Mike recently:
A hearse is driving up a steep hill when the coffin slides backwards, hits the back door and falls out. It slides down the hill, picking up speed and at the bottom of the hill crashes through the front doors of a drug store. The coffin continues through the store, hitting the pharmacy counter, wherein the lid pops up and the body sits up. The druggist looks over the counter and asks, “May I help you?”
The body says, “Yeah. You got anything to stop this coffin’?”
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God gives a young man a slice of lemmings (no, not as in a thin piece of a lemming, “slice” is the correct term for a group of lemmings, in this case let’s say somewhere between 100-150.) and instructs him to take them to a far away city and give them to the King.
The man does as he’s been told and leads the lemmings over hill and dale, through forests and fields. He then comes to a river.
The man tells the lemmings to jump in and swim across.
The first few lemmings jump into the river and immediately sink. The man instructs the other lemmings to stop, jumps in after the ones sinking and pulls them to safety. He then sits down to ponder the situation.
Shortly after this a lovely young maiden comes along. The man explains to the maiden what has happened. The maiden thinks about the situation for a few moments and then tells the man, “Walk beside the river for a ways and find a place where it is shallow enough for the lemmings to walk across.”
The man takes the maiden’s advice. He walks along the river and finds a shallow place where the lemmings and walk across. He then leads the lemmings to the spot and guides them safely across.
The moral of this story…and we all know there’s always a moral to the story, right? “When God gives you lemmings, made lemmings wade.”
Heard a good, clean, cute one, ideally one involving word play or puns? Please do send it to us.
Posted by Jon under Processes & best practice |
In a recent conversation with a sales director, he noted that that most of their organisation’s bids were made face-to-face with the client, using PowerPoint – invariably resulting in the deal being won. What value, therefore, could professional proposal staff bring to their sales process? It led to an interesting debate, and I thought I’d share my perspectives here.
Certainly, the most strategic proposal centres offer expertise to craft bid / proposal presentations, as well as the typical written tomes (in Word) that often spring to mind when one thinks about a ‘proposal’. They’ll work with the salespeople on presentation content, on slide design, on associated collateral for the presentation session. They’ll help to ensure that the process runs smoothly, and to ensure that the offer made in the presentation is robust and appropriately approved. They’ll help to manage logistics and rehearsals (where possible) – including, for example, working out answers to the “top ten toughest questions” the client may throw at the team during their pitch.
But if your clients are invariably buying from you directly as a result of a PowerPoint presentation, and you’re rarely losing, that would typically suggest that you are the sole contender – rather than being part of a formal competitive tendering process. If you can get to this stage, that’s great news. Indeed, when a good proposal centre is engaged early enough by their sales colleagues, one of the key goals should be to wire the process in their favour. This may be by working out tactics to avoid ever reaching a competitive tender (e.g. via a proactive proposal or workshop-based approach) – or, at the least, by influencing the client’s process / requirements / criteria. In that sense, most proposal teams don’t actually want to end up writing proposals!
But if this is case, it’s no wonder that you win so regularly and easily – and the debate perhaps needs to focus more on whether you’re optimising scope and (particularly) margin. Moreover, such “safe” sales presentations in non-competitive situations with existing clients isn’t really where proposal professionals add the most value. They focus more typically on competitive deals – which are, of course, often the ‘norm’ when you’re trying to acquire new clients rather than simply ‘farming’ your installed base. Perhaps, we pondered, his salespeople are playing it too safe – and could be being more adventurous in chasing new business? Perhaps their very lack of proposal capability inhibits sales growth, with the account managers too scared (or lazy?) to chase any opportunities that would require a written proposal?
Posted by BJ under Musings |
Once again* Dilbert (from the mind of Scott Adams) captures exactly how it often feels doing what we do.
*Many of the Dilbert comics present situations that are all too familiar to us proposal folks. I suspect Scott Adams was involved in a fair few proposal efforts while he was working as an engineer.
Posted by Jon under Musings |
Back in the summer, my son Benedict and I went away for a short break to north Wales. We spent a lovely few days, exploring mountains, castles and steam trains (always popular with a ten year old!).
As we returned to our hotel one night in the small town of Porthmadog, our eye was caught by a coach bearing our name:
Next to it was a minibus:
On closer inspection, this was also from a company called Williams. Only this time:
What amused me was that both vehicles displayed precisely the same telephone number. In other words, the good people of the town in which we were staying would recognise the company’s bus with a happy: “Oh look, there goes our local company – Williams of Porthmadog.” Meanwhile, anyone living five miles down the road and wanting to book a coach from their own town’s provider would happily call Williams of Criccieth. As a means of tailoring your story to the audience, I thought this was pretty cool!
Posted by BJ under Musings, Word play & writing |
One of our directors, Graham, related the following.
“I was just hit by my wife Hillary. In hindsight, I deserved it and there is a lesson/reminder for us proposal folks behind the reason for her having reacting to something I said as she did.
I brought home a piece of banana cake that I had left over from my lunch*. Upon taking it out I commented to her, in an attempt to flatter her about her own, quite tasty, banana cake, “this banana cake is a million times worse than yours.”
I was quite taken aback when, rather than smiling and saying, “Thank You’ as I had anticipated her doing, she instead got a funny look on her face. I reiterated that I thought this was indeed ‘a million times worse’, emphasizing the “worse” aspect, lest she misunderstand that I was saying I thought hers was much better. This time, without any hesitation, she slapped my leg… hard too!
She then explained to me (very slowly and rather condescendingly I felt), that what I was saying wasn’t very flattering, as hers was only ‘less worse’ than this ‘worser’ cake.
In hindsight this certainly would have been better received if I’d focused on the positive, saying something along the lines of, “Your banana cake is so much better than this cake.”
As is the case in developing content for proposals, it is always better to “accentuate the positive” (and we certainly don’t want to unintentionally highlight or bring up a negative idea or concept.**
*One does have to wonder, if the banana cake was indeed, “a million times worse’ than the cake Hillary makes Graham, why on earth did you bring it home? :)
** One of the examples we use of this is our workshops is that of a certain US leader (who shall remain nameless but I’ve no doubt you’ll know to whom I’m referring), who, in an attempt to defend himself repeatedly stated, “I did not have relations with that woman.” The words that resonate from this – the unintentional negative – are ‘relations’ and ‘woman’, not what Bill…I mean this unnamed individual…was hoping for. He could have put the emphasis on the positive by saying instead, “I have always been faithful to my wife.” (He’d have been lying, put at least he’d be sending the right message. :) )
Posted by Jon under Musings |
Ever worked on a “must win” deal?
Yep, I thought so. And what’s the difference between “must win” and “nice to win”? Generally, in practice, often not a lot. A little more involvement (interference?) from senior executives; perhaps a few more review meetings; lots more stress; those on high taking the glory if you capture the business (and preparing to point fingers if you don’t)?
I was chatting about this to a team recently, and recalled a lovely phrase used by Gerard Houllier, when he was manager of my beloved Liverpool. (That’s a soccer club, for American readers).
He was asked in an interview:
“Is it reasonable to say that Saturday’s match is a must-win game?”
His reply?
“It’s not a must win game. It’s a will win game.”
I think bids should be like that. “Must win” isn’t good enough, if it merely means that senior folks take a little more interest and bring greater pressure to bear on the proposal team. “Will win” implies serious commitment and support from those on high, with a corresponding focus on providing the right resources to do what’s necessary to produce a first-class proposal in an efficient way.
So, next time you’re told a deal’s a “must win”, why not stop and ask whether it really is – or whether it’s actually a “will win”, and what’s going to be done to make it so.
