Posted by Jon on 31 May, 2010 under Musings | 
We’re here in Florida, raring to go for this year’s APMP conference. We’re due to have ten of our team here this year, and most of us arrived last night having flown in from Europe and across the States.
I was reminded of this on Sunday evening, as we sat in the steak restaurant at this year’s APMP conference hotel. The assembled group handed me the wine list – as they know that’s a great way to keep me quiet for a while as I savour the thought of the available options! When the sommelier arrived to take our order, I asked his opinion about a particularly-interesting wine on the list.
“It’s far too young to drink now, sir. But this one’s really good.” And he pointed to an alternative costing nearly twice as much – the most expensive selection in that particular section of the list. Now, had he recommended one (say) $10 – $15 more expensive, I’d have happily heeded his advice – but one at virtually twice the price?
So… if it’s not drinking well now, what on earth is it doing on the list? Sometimes including too much information in the proposal (i.e., here, the wine list) actually damages your credibility. And if the customer’s given you an indication of their price range, countering with a suggestion so far outside their stated parameters is hardly likely to impress. Your offer doesn’t always need to be the cheapest, but it does always need to fall within the customer’s affordability window
The dinner as a whole was also a good indication of the need to adapt your sales approach to the requirements of the specific customer. We were all pretty tired, having only recently arrived in the hotel from (variously) the UK and across the US. Most of us had skipped lunch on our travels (in my case, no food whatsoever being entirely preferable to British Airways’ meal offerings). For some of us, counting the time difference, it was already well after midnight for our body clocks by the time we got to the restaurant. I mentioned this as we chatted cheerfully to the lady who greeted us on our arrival in the restaurant.
I’m guessing it must then have been an hour or more before our order was taken. By this point, we were all so hungry and tired that we declined the suggestion of appetisers. By the time we’d finished our entrees, we were in no mood for desserts (especially given the time it might have taken them to arrive). Now they must have guests – relaxing on vacation at Disney – who want a leisurely dinner; in our case, ignoring our stated buying preferences cost them the best part of $150 in lost additional revenue.
If you’re here for the conference, the steaks are pretty decent – I’d give them about 7.5 out of 10. So don’t let my comments put you off! But maybe we should invite the staff across to the event?!
We headed straight into the hotel’s steak restaurant, and the group handed me the wine list – knowing that that’s a great way to keep me quiet for a while! When the sommelier arrived to take our order, I asked his opinion about a particularly-interesting wine on the list.
“It’s far too young to drink now, sir. But this one’s really good.” And he pointed to an alternative costing nearly twice as much – the most expensive selection in that particular section of the list. Now, had he recommended one (say) $10 – $15 more expensive, I’d have happily heeded his advice – but one at virtually twice the price?
So… to the first half of his statement: if it’s not drinking well now, what on earth is it doing on the list? Sometimes including too much information in the proposal (i.e., here, the wine list) actually damages your credibility. And if the customer’s given you an indication of their price range, countering with a suggestion so far outside the clues they’ve given you is hardly likely to impress. Your offer doesn’t always need to be the cheapest, but it does always need to fall within the customer’s affordability window
The dinner as a whole was also a good indication of the need to adapt your sales approach to the requirements of the specific customer. We were all pretty tired, after long journeys – and for some of us, counting the time difference, it was already well after midnight for our body clocks by the time we got to the restaurant. Moreover, most of us had skipped lunch on our travels (in my case, no food whatsoever being entirely preferable to British Airways’ meal offerings). I mentioned this as we chatted cheerfully to the lady who greeted us on our arrival and showed us to our table.
I’m guessing it must then have been an hour or more before our order was taken. By this point, we were all so hungry and tired that we declined the suggestion of appetisers. By the time we’d finished our entrees, we were in no mood for desserts (especially given the time it might have taken them to arrive). Now they must have guests – relaxing on vacation at Disney – who want a leisurely dinner; in our case, ignoring our stated buying preferences cost them the best part of $150 in lost additional revenue.
If you’re here for the conference, the steaks are pretty decent – I’d give them about 7.5 out of 10. So don’t let my comments put you off! But maybe we should invite the staff across to the event?!
Posted by Jon and BJ on 29 May, 2010 under Proposal Guys news |
The theme of this year’s APMP conference – taking place in Florida during the coming week – is “Going green”. In Strategic Proposals (the business of which BJ and I are the principal directors), we decided to take on the APMP challenge and review our own approach to sustainability. As a result, we’ve just published our first corporate environment policy – something we believe to be a first in the proposal training / consultancy market.
We’ve reproduced the policy below, for two reasons – first, because we’d welcome any feedback or views as we strive lead our own operations in a more environmentally-friendly manner, and second to challenge readers here to produce their own policies. Here’s what we’ve committed to doing – and do let us know your plans:
Strategic Proposals Environmental Policy
Strategic Proposals seeks to achieve excellence in every aspect of our business and to champion best practice within the proposal profession.
As such, we are committed to minimising the environmental impact of our operations and to encouraging other proposal teams to do likewise.
To achieve this, we have adopted the following ten step policy across each of our business units worldwide. We will:
- Seek to off-set the carbon emissions associated with our business travel, embedding this within our standard terms of engagement.
- Minimise international travel as far as possible whilst meeting our client’s business needs, by working with and promoting local partner companies within the Strategic Proposals International Network.
- Use public transport rather than private vehicles wherever possible.
- Use materials from sustainable sources (e.g. FSC-compliant) for all of our printed documentation and training course materials.
- Reduce paper usage, by adopting and advocating duplex (double-sided) printing for all proposal-related activity and recycling all redundant paper from bidding and training programmes.
- Promote an environmentally responsible approach to print and production within the training and advice that we provide to clients, and in our written articles and conference presentations.
- Incorporate a specific section on environmental best practice within the Strategic Proposals Benchmarking Model, by the end of 2010.
- Sponsor an annual award, to be offered to the proposal centre worldwide that, in our opinion, has done the most to reflect environmental best practice.
- Communicate the importance of environmental issues to our staff, associates and business partners on a regular basis, encouraging feedback.
- Annually review our environmental policies and performance, and allocate resources for their effective direction and implementation.
We welcome – and will actively seek – constructive feedback on our policy from our clients and others in the proposal profession.
Strategic Proposals, May 2010.
Posted by BJ on 27 May, 2010 under Musings |
As many of you are aware, I am a big fan of comedy, especially stand-up. So it was with great interest that I read an AP article on Bob Newhart celebrating 50 years in showbiz. (Normally at this point I’d provide information regarding the person I had referenced but I doubt there’s anyone reading this that doesn’t know who Bob Newhart is. In fact, I suspect many of you will have even played a few rounds of “Hi Bob”*).
In reading the article, as happens fairly often, I came upon some comments and ideas that relate to the work we do as proposal professionals.
Says Bob (who’s 81 and been doing stand-up for 50+ years),
“I’ve had time off and it drove me nuts. I was crawling up the walls. I know some people say, ‘I want to quit making people laugh. That doesn’t make sense to me. Why would I want to stop?” I think for many of us, it’s the same mind set. If we’re doing things right, developing proposal is exciting, challenging, and fun.
As regards refinement –
“I have an idea and I’ll try it in Seattle and maybe refine it a bit in Calgary and maybe refine it a little more in Vancouver. The art of it is doing it a million times and see what happens. That’s a kick. Do it a million times but make it seem like it’s the first time. That’s the art of it.” Here too, lots of parallels to what we do, if we’re doing things right. We submit content within one proposal, get feedback, refine it, and submit it to on next opportunity, constantly trying to make it as powerful as possible and tailored to the specific client (think audience here!). And we need to make it appear fresh, no matter how many times it’s been used (think ‘cut and paste’ done right.)
On preparation –
“About 6pm, I start pacing up and down getting ready for a show. You never take it for granted cause if you do it will slap you in the face and make you wake up.” This, after 50+ years. Still a bit nervous each time. Still the nervous anticipation. Still acknowledging the need to not take things for granted. I need not point out the parallel here to our work, right?
*For those of you who might not be familiar with this game, “Hi Bob” is a drinking game wherein the players have to take a drink each time one of the characters says, “Hi Bob”. (Each of the characters says this every time they see Bob…which is several times during each episode.)
Posted by Jon on 25 May, 2010 under Musings |
I had the misfortune to stay recently at a Holiday Inn in Germany that was an abject lesson in mediocrity. Despite the best efforts of the staff (whose English was thankfully far better than my very rusty German), everything about the place was just plain ordinary – dull, uninspired, dated. It was as if all of the right components were present – but with no flair, no imagination, no passion.
That in itself feels like a blog entry – in my previous sentence, I could just have been describing so many sales proposals. But that wasn’t actually what I wanted to discuss!
See, I’d just eaten a decidely average main course at dinner – Wiener Schnitzel, which is quite hard to do as badly as they had – when the waitress handed me the menu. And there, to my excitement, was a wonderful-sounding dessert:
Weisse Schokoladen Ravioli Gefullt mit Rhabarber Und Weissem Portweineis.
(That’s ‘white chocolate ravioli filled with rhubarb and white port wine ice cream’, for readers who share my limited linguistic ability).
So: there’s rhubarb. That’s guaranteed to prick my interest. (Want to sell Jon a dish in a restaurant? Put something on the menu with rhubarb, gooseberry or rabbit. Just not on the same plate!)
White chocolate, too? Wow! A clever ice cream? Hey, I spend hours experimenting with my ice cream maker at home, trying to create new fand often offbeat lavours. Presented in a format that sounded intriguing (’ravioli’ – how would that work, then?)
You can guess what it was like – a tragically-misguided, astoundingly inept waste of good ingredients. Truly, awesomely, astonishingly bad. And – here’s the thing – I was actually disappointed, as if the warning signs hadn’t all been screaming at me.
Now I’m not an inexperienced purchaser – in restaurants, as well as in the world of work. Yet I’d still gone ahead and placed the order. in spite of my suspicions that it was too good to be true, In spite of the fact that it was priced at about £5 – for which any European restaurant will struggle to do anything clever, but which kept the total cost of my meal within my customer’s rather parsimonious budget.
So maybe there’s hope for proposal folks working in companies whose solutions really aren’t market leading. Choose your words carefully; hit the customer’s hot buttons; pitch the offer at an attractive price – and you might just win. Hey, the customer will be disappointed, and won’t come back (I picked up a sandwich and a chocolate bar at the nearby station on the second night of my stay), but you’ll have won the business and pocketed the revenue.
Am I sounding cynical, perchance?
Posted by BJ on 20 May, 2010 under APMP & accreditation |
I’ve had several e-mails from people who have decided to seek APMP accreditation asking me whether they should attend a workshop or just take the exam. While I’ve responded to those people individually, I will also address this question here, as many of you who are considering seeking APMP accreditation might be asking the same question.
The APMP Foundation level accreditation exam tests an individual’s knowledge of basic proposal best practices, which is, in my opinion, appropriate for the first level of accreditation.
However, for several reasons (which I won’t go into here at the moment but which I will perhaps address in a future post) the exam is also heavily based on federal government proposals. Those of you who have only worked on commercial or public sector proposals would probably not be familiar with concepts or terms such as ‘color reviews’, ‘capture planning’, etc. Further, the correct answers are very specific, and while you might think the correct answer is “it depends” (that is, based on the particular scenario), you need to give the answer that is looked for. All this makes for it being extremely difficult for those who have only worked on commercial proposal to pass without extensive review of the exam material. Even those who work primarily or solely within the government space tell us that the exam can be difficult to pass without the appropriate review of the exam material.
What Jon and I hear from those who have attended workshops we’ve presented, both verbally and on feedback forms is:
- “I never would have passed this exam without having attended this session.”
- “I might have passed, but the workshop gave me the confidence to know I would pass.”
- “The review of materials within the workshop was incredibly helpful and definitely contributed to my passing the exam.”
- “I work on federal proposals and I would have had a very difficult time passing this exam without having attended this session.”
- “The tips for how to approach and take the exam were invaluable.”
- “I would highly recommend this workshop, especially to those who work on commercial proposals.”
I’ve no doubt that it’s possible to pass the exam by studying on your own and I’m sure many people have. I’m also equally sure that the workshop makes it much easier to review, prepare for and ultimately pass the APMP Foundation Level accreditation exam.
Posted by Jon on 18 May, 2010 under Word play & writing |
After my last post discussing one of the subtle differences between US and UK English, a reader dropped me an email asking about the “reliable online source” I’d used to check out a particular proofreading point. The site in question may well be of interest to many of our readers, so I thought I’d share its details here.
It’s called wikiHow, and it has a rather lovely section on “English Grammar”. (Interestingly, one of my current bugbears is excessive capitalisation in documents – I can’t help wondering whether a more modern usage for the section’s title would be “English grammar”!).
Amongst the topics covered are sections on how to:
- avoid colloquial (informal) writing
- use italics
- understand the difference between passive and active sentences
- improve your grammar
- use “who” and “whom” correctly.
If you’re stuck for something to read in your lunch hour, or just want to brush up on your skills, the site makes for fascinating reading. Take that section on how to ‘use italics’, for example. Much as italics can be useful to pick out specific words in a sentence, I’ve long disliked reading proposals that contain long italicised sentences – they always seem harder on the eye, and the italics somehow seem to trivialise the material.
Here, therefore, is an overview of the site’s guidance on the seven areas in which the authors recommend or mandate the use of italics, including some of their illustrative examples:
- Use italics to provide emphasis or contrast in running Roman text… “He had managed to eat not nine, but ten whole cookies.”
- Use italics to denote titles… “I just can’t stop reading The Collins Pocket English Dictionary.”
- Use italics for foreign words discussed in a sentence… “The Latin word caudex roughly translates as ‘blockhead’.”
- Use italics for foreign words or phrases not considered fully part of the English language… “I just got the weirdest feeling of déjà vu.”
- Apply italics when citing English words [instead of using single quotes]… “I love the word flabbergasted.”
- Italicize names of vehicles… “The Enola Gay.”
- Keep in mind that certain disciplines have various specific purposes for italics. Two of the more common examples are in biology and law (legal cases)… “The famous case of Gideon v. Wainwright was a landmark in American legal history… Homo sapiens, the name for the human species, belongs to the genus Homo.”
Their section on punctuation – with some really good pointers on common pitfalls – is another one I particularly enjoyed.
Of course, the web’s never really going to be a reliable substitute for your favourite reference tome (such as my well-thumbed Cambridge copy-editing handbook). But the wikiHow pages appear to be full of well-written, accurate, practical advice and the site’s certainly worth a browse.
Posted by BJ on 14 May, 2010 under APMP & accreditation |
Are you APMP accredited yet? If you are, great and congratulations. If you’ve been considering seeking APMP accreditation but have been putting this off, for whatever reason, perhaps a milestone which is rapidly approaching will act as a catalyst and cause you to seek APMP accreditation.
The milestone? Given the number of members who have achieved some level of APMP accreditation to date, as well as the number of members who will achieve APMP Foundation level accreditation either at workshops prior to or at the annual APMP conference, by the time of the conference – the first week of June – more than 50% of APMP members will have achieved some level of APMP accreditation.
I’ve no doubt that reaching the point where the majority of APMP members have some level of accreditation will lead to an expectation of a person working in the proposal arena being APMP accredited. More and more, ads for proposal staff will read, “APMP accreditation required” or “APMP accreditation given preference.”
The good news is there’s still time for you to become accredited prior to the conference. We will facilitate an APMP Foundation Level Accreditation Preparation Workshop and Exam in the Washington D.C. on May 24t (information and registration regarding the workshops Strategic Proposals has scheduled can be found at www.apmpaccreditation.com). And there’s also a workshop scheduled immediately prior to the conference.
Jon and I, as strong supporters of and believers in the value of APMP accreditation, hope reaching this important milestone will help many you who have been undecided about APMP accreditation finally go for it (and we hope to see you in one of our upcoming workshops!)
