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?
