Posted by Jon under Musings | 
An interesting discussion yesterday with a friend who’s taken on a new role heading proposal management for a rather diverse organisation. To what extent, she wondered, do proposal managers earn commission if they help to win the deal, and does that vary by sector?
It’s always been a regret for me that I didn’t accept a win bonus when I ran the bid centre at Compaq years ago. Given my team then helped to secure $1.5bn of business in a very short time, I’d have been rich had I been pocketing a share of the spoils. But the purist in me prevails: the proposal is a key element of the win, but far from the only factor. Moreover, if you put proposal managers on commission, it can drive the wrong behaviours: rivalry between proposal centre members (”why is s/he always given the good deals”); lack of mutual support on bids (”I won’t get any money, so why should I help”); sales people feeling threatened (”they’re stealing from my pot”).
Then again, we do deserve to be well-rewarded – and helping our sales colleagues to win is, after all, what we’re here to do. My personal preference is that there’s a hefty bonus scheme in place, in which the amount and percentage won is a major factor. Barbara Esmedina’s excellent survey tends to validate the assumption that win bonuses are rare: only 16% of respondents receive a “bonus tied to winning business (specific to RFP/sales activity”), whereas 65% get bonuses linked to performance / merit. I’m curious to know what others think – and what works well in organisations around the world. Do let us have your comments!
Posted by BJ under Musings |
I received a mail recently, written by our friend Penny B., which had her list of what might be received by a proposal support person during “The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It was quite funny and much forwarded. Thanks for sharing that with all of us Penny.
Penny’s list prompted me to do my own version of the 12 items, included below for your enjoyment and amusement.
The 12 Days of Christmas Proposals
On the first day of Christmas my client said to me,
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the second day of Christmas my client said to me,
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the third day of Christmas my client said to me,
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the fourth day of Christmas my client said to me,
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the fifth day of Christmas my client said to me,
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the sixth day of Christmas my client said to me,
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the seventh day of Christmas my client said to me,
No questions will be answered after the RFP is released
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the eight day of Christmas my client said to me,
You must include a compliance matrix
No questions will be answered after the RFP is released
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the ninth day of Christmas my client said to me,
All fonts must be larger than 9 point
You must include a compliance matrix
No questions will be answered after the RFP is released
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the tenth day of Christmas my client said to me,
Submit financials in a separate volume.
All fonts must be larger than 9 point
You must include a compliance matrix
No questions will be answered after the RFP is released
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the eleventh day of Christmas my client said to me,
Expect to see additional requirements.
Submit financials in a separate volume.
All fonts must be larger than 9 point
You must include a compliance matrix
No questions will be answered after the RFP is released
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
On the twelfth day of Christmas my client said to me,
Good luck and we look forward to receiving your proposal.
Expect to see additional requirements.
Submit financials in a separate volume.
All fonts must be larger than 9 point
You must include a compliance matrix
No questions will be answered after the RFP is released
There’s a bidder’s conference on Monday
Use binders with three rings
Four forms must be completed and signed
Please submit 1 original and 2 copies
It’s due in two weeks.
I’m sending you an R – F – P.
Posted by Jon under Musings, Proposal Guys news |
Last month, BJ and had some fun during our keynote opening the second day of the UKAPMP conference by finding out about the group’s collective experience. With 200-odd people in the room, our spot survey revealed that between us:
- over 1,000 trees had been cut down in the past year to generate the paper needed for the hard copy proposals we’d submitted: hopefully they’d all coe from sustainable sources!
- we had around 1,500 years of proposal management experience
- we’d won some £12bn ($18bn) of contracts in our careers – roughly equivalent to the GDP of Paraguay!
Meanwhile, our company (Strategic Proposals) has been celebrating ten years since our UK business was founded. A few of our friends from client organisations joined us for a small dinner in London last week; Steve Mullins (who chairs our board of directors) and I were hugely honoured to receive a truly lovely message in absentia from Rene Schuster, CEO of Telefónica Germany, marking the occasion: click here to download and view the video if you’re interested and have a minute to spare. It certainly made us feel very proud: watching it for the first time was a very special moment.
Posted by Jon under Musings |
Outside work, I’m an avid user of Twitter – finding it a great way to keep in touch with my geographically-diverse friendship group, especially when I’m off travelling for work. (I’m a more recent convert to Facebook, too, and I’m still rather wrestling with the relative roles of the two systems).
I was therefore fascinated to read of a recent study by sociologists at Cornell University, reported in the New York Times:
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons.
Use of positive words and phrases:
- crested around breakfast time (6 a.m. – 9 a.m.)
- fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.
- then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner.
Particularly interesting was that tweets followed broadly the same pattern at weekends as on weekdays (albeit around two hours later). As the researchers commented:
“This is a significant finding because one explanation out there for the pattern was just that people hate going to work. But if that were the case, the pattern should be different on the weekends, and it’s not. That suggests that something more fundamental is driving this — that it’s due to biological or circadian factors.”
I wonder if there’s any learning in this for proposal managers? I guess it suggests that if we’re trying to engineer creativity or secure commitment from people, we’re best doing that earlier in the day than later. Organise a review meeting at 3 p.m. – and you’re potentially going to get people at their most downbeat and negative: not necessarily the ideal mood for constructive input.
Posted by Jon under Musings |
Sometimes, as a proposal professional, our job becomes to surprise the customer – to take the evaluation team aback with the originality of our approach and the degree of empathy that we create, often in the most subtle of ways.
Now, I love trying to learn from other creative professions – artistic folks, writers, marketeers, advertisers – and I’ve just seen the most amazing example of this (thanks to my friend Emma, who linked to it on her Facebook page earlier this evening). It’s the new Christmas* advert from British department store John Lewis (bettering, IMHO, even their incredible “Always a Woman” ad from last year).
Turn down the volume so as to not disturb the other folks in your open plan office; get a box of paper handkerchiefs; and wonder what on earth we** could do to influence customers like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSLOnR1s74o
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* Sorry, it’s mid-November. Did I mention Christmas?!
** Frankly, if you don’t get the parallels with proposals, I hope you enjoy an amazing piece of advertising anyway!
Posted by Jon under Musings |
I spent a rather lovely day out grape-picking recently – a birthday present last December from my friend Carrie that had to wait to be enjoyed until the autumnal harvest was ready. I say ‘picking’ – we did a little of that, but it’s perhaps fair to say that the subsequent tour of the winery (yes, we do make wine in England!) and tasting consumed the larger portion of the time we spent at the vineyard.
Later, we went for dinner with her partner, and decided that more wine was called for – and on the list, I spied this rather complex explanation:
After a huge investment of both time and money this wine is now presented with a stelvin closure to preserve freshness and purity of fruit, whilst also avoiding the possibility of cork taint.
Anyone guess what that means?
Yep, you got it: “Screw cap.”
It sounds like the sort of thing I read in proposals all too often – content contributors feeling the need to write over-elaborate text, incorporating jargon wherever possible, as if doing so makes them sound clever. And, of course, it usually achieves the exact opposite. Never forget to keep it simple!
Posted by Jon under Musings, Proposal Guys news |
I’ve been travelling pretty extensively lately, spending four nights at home in the past four weeks, amidst extended work trips to locations including Egypt and Malaysia. In Kuala Lumpur over the weekend prior to running an APMP Foundation course, I browsed Time Out (the listings magazine) looking for somewhere good to eat.
This place sounded fun:
“The best Italian restaurant in Malaysia”, no less. Impressed? I was, until I noted the footnote in small print – ‘as voted by the owner’s mother-in-law’! Now, the humour made me smile, But it’s an interesting illustration of the power of a proof point: something so important in proposals.
Awards won, benchmarking data, comments from clients, quotes from the press or from analyst reports – they all help to bring your story to life. And our research suggests that evidence and references that substantiate your claims are highly prized by evaluators. And, of course, it’s not unknown for companies drawing on analyst reports in their proposals to have commissioned the very research they’re quoting in the first place!
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PS You might have noticed that our planned summer break ended up being a little longer than planned! Sorry: we’ve been having some interesting technical challenges with the blog database, including a string of scheduled posts that simply didn’t appear. We decided to step back from posting until it was fixed – which it now hopefully is (says he, crossing his fingers!)… Thanks for your patience.
