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!

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.

• 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.

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.

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

–

* 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!

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!

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!

–

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.

My son Benedict used to ask me a similar question when he was much younger: “What do you do at work, daddy?” I guess if one’s an engine driver, a police officer, a teacher, it’s easy to respond. But how to explain to a small child about the world of proposals?

My answer, which seemed to satisfy him? “I go to work to help business people to tell stories.”

Now he’s somewhat older, and he knows much more of what I do, I think he’s a bit disappointed that my working life’s not quite as glamorous as “storytelling” might imply. But I actually think it’s a pretty good summary of what we do.

For those unfamiliar with snowboarding I’d point out a few differences that relate to the point I’d like to make in this post. These differences are – the bindings, the speed of travel and dealing with flat stretches.

Bindings – Unlike ski bindings which allow a skier to very quickly and easily step into their bindings, snowboard bindings require a boarder has to ‘strap in’ and this typically takes a few moments. Also, unlike skiers who are able to ride the chairlift while still in their ski bindings, a boarder has to undo the rear binding each time they get on the lift and then strap in again when they get to the top of the lift. At the top of the lift, my friends very graciously wait for me each time I have to strap in, occasionally teasing me about their having to “wait for the boarder”.

Speed – Another difference between skiing and snowboarding, at least for my style of riding (that being ‘surf style’ wherein I do a lot of turning rather than going straight down the slope), is that I don’t go as fast as the people I am with, again necessitating their waiting for me. While going down a slope, one or two of my friends will always stop and wait for me to catch up. Again doing so graciously and occasionally teasing me about their having to wait for me.

Flat stretches – When covering a flat section, a snowboarder can only use the momentum they carry into the section and if the momentum is gone before they reach a section with enough pitch, they will come to a stop. They then have to release their rear binding, walk the section (awkwardly at best and usually with some difficulty) and then have to strap in again when they have reached a section with the necessary pitch to get them going again. A skier, having two separate skis, has the advantage of being able to ‘skate’ and propel him or her self through the section. An alternative for a boarder is to have a skier extend a pole which they then grab and the skier pulls them through the section. This is what my friends do for me. Coming into a flat section, one of them will extend a pole to me and pull me through the section enabling me to keep going and not have to release my rear binding, walk the section and then strap in again. It also eliminates the need for them to wait for me which is probably their real motive.

My riding with this group of skiers is enjoyable because they extend me these courtesies and I greatly appreciate their patience and caring.

Recently, I rode with a group of three skiers whom I had just met. At the top of lift they would reluctantly wait for me, making comments about losing time on the slopes. Then they would take off at high speed and quickly be out of my sight and I wouldn’t catch up to them until I reached the lift at the bottom. Here again they’d make a snide remark about my being slow and slowing them down. Not surprisingly, when we came to flat spots, they would look back and watch as I inevitably slowed and then came to a stop and had to release my binding and ten walk…watching them disappear ahead of me. As you can imagine, this was not much fun and I after two runs I decided I’d rather not ride with them.

As I was riding with this second group, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much more enjoyable it was to ride with my friends. I realized there was a corollary to those proposal groups where the members perform as a team – supporting one another, being patient with those who might need a bit of time to catch up and the good natured ribbing that goes with people who enjoy working with each other. Being a member of this type of team is not only enjoyable but, in my experience, they are more productive and they produce higher quality results. I want to work with – and ride with – a team wherein members support one another.

The drink’ll be thrust onto the end of the counter: “Venti decaf skinny capp”. You look at those around you – is that mine, or did someone in front of me in line order the same thing? And, the moment of minor stress duly over, you pick up the cup and wander off to enjoy your caffeine injection.

Now, picture the coffee shop at the APMP conference hotel a couple of months back. Same process – queue, order, pay – with one addition: the cashier asked for my first name. On to wait for the drink, which was then served with the phrase “large decaf cappuccino for Jon”.

Now, which do you prefer? The personalised approach certainly worked for me – and I saw an obvious parallel in writing proposals. Forget the standard, product-based approach – the more personalised the communication, the more
appealing it’ll be to the buyer.