Posted by BJ on 17 February, 2010 under Processes & best practice | 
“Responders are invited to attend the opening of bids.” Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? If you haven’t been to a bid opening, this might conjure up images of a red carpets, various dignitaries, maybe a celebrity or two, the press standing by and flashbulbs popping.* If you have attended a bid opening, your experience was probably a bit different than this.
The bid openings I have attended have been very staid events, limited to the client announcing which companies had submitted a response, opening the boxes and a quick count of the documents. During the openings I’ve attended, the documents were never even removed from the boxes. Needless to say, they have hardly been the media events I might have hoped for.
Based on this, I’ve been inclined not to attend bid opening (unless they happened to be close by and it was convenient for me to attend (or they were in a city wished to visit).
My thinking on this has changed, based on an experience one of our clients had recently. Here’s the story (there’s always a story, right?)
For this particular RFP, submitting the documents, for all the usual reasons, came down to the very last minute (big surprise, right?). In order to ensure the document would be submitted on time, two members of the team drove to the client (some 6+ hours away), while the rest of the team worked away. The document was then sent to a printer near the client and the two team members put the documents together there. (This was Plan C, necessitated by a combination of a printer which kept acting up and a heavy snowstorm that threatened to keep planes from flying.).
The two members then delivered the document to the client (with minutes to spare). The bid opening was scheduled for an hour later and, since they were already there, they decided to attend the bid opening. This would prove to be a very good decision!
At this particular bid opening, the activities were as I described above – documents were acknowledged, counted, etc. But then, quite surprisingly and in my experience, quite unusually, the client offered to allow those in attendance – drum roll here – to review ALL of the responses. Yep…you read that right. My client was allowed to sit and review the responses submitted by their competitors. As my client was quick to point out, “This was worth the long drive, the extra effort, time away from home, etc. The information we gleaned from our competitor’s documents will be incredibly valuable to us for future bids.
So as you might expect, I am now an advocate for always attending bid openings.
*As to ‘flash bulbs popping’. I came across this phrase in an article in the newspaper recently and found it most distracting. After all, when’s the last time someone used flashbulbs, much less heard them pop? (While our readers who are near my age will certainly recall flashbulbs – perhaps in a Kodak Brownie or in your Polaroid Swinger - I suspect many of our younger proposal folks have never even seen a flashbulb.
Posted by Jon on 15 February, 2010 under Musings, Processes & best practice |
So enough of sales for a moment: what about other types of proposal? Consider the following, if you will:
“Hola! You’re very pretty! God, I realy luv beautiful hot cuties like u!”
An amusing study at dating site “OK Cupid” has analysed the language used by their members when first making contact with someone new, and found that certain phrases have a marked impact on the reply rates. The sentence in brackets above (“Hola…”) breaks about ten of their rules; the site would suggest something like the following (with 24 of their recommended phrases in bold):
How’s it going?
Your profile is really fascinating. I noticed that you mention pretty much all of the things I enjoy. That’s awesome! It’s nice that you love literature and movies; LOL I’m curious what your favourites might be, although I’m guessing that you have good taste.
PS I’d like to apologise for the fact I’m a bit of an awkward atheist. Sorry! But I am a vegetarian, and I did get some tattoos when I was in a metal band whilst studying physics at grad school, ha ha!
OK, maybe not… But it’s an interesting article nonetheless, and did make me reflect on the language used in sales proposals. (See, the post’s relevant after all!). Here are just a few of the phrases from the report that suggest that successful proposals of any sort have some underlying similarities:
- Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. (But hey, we don’t need trained proofreaders to check our sales proposals, do we??)
- People normally like compliments, but when they’re used as pick-up lines, before you’ve even met in person, they inevitably feel…ew. (“You’re such a wonderful organisation, and we’d love to work with you on this truly exciting project…”?)
- The way you choose to start your initial message to someone is the “first impression of your first impression.” (See various entries here on Executive Summaries!)
- Even more effective are phrases that engage the reader’s own interests, or show you’ve read their profile. (Profile = RFP!)
- Be careful not to let the appearance of vulnerability become the appearance of sweaty desperation: please is on the negative list (“Thank you so much for inviting us to bid for this contract…”?)
I wonder if proposal folks are particularly skilled at dating?!
Posted by BJ on 1 February, 2010 under Musings, Processes & best practice |
I recently read the book “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief”. (McPherson, Penguin, © 2008), a documentary on, as the title suggests, Lincoln as the Commander in Chief for the United States during his presidency and the Civil War (the war having begun for all intent and purposes simultaneously with him being elected President.)
One of the great many eloquent statements made by Lincoln regarding the war is,
“The political objective (in this case, keeping the United States intact and not allowing States to secede from the Union) is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. Therefore, it is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.”
This statement is equally true for proposals as they relate to the overall sales process. Written for proposals, this statement would be,
“The objective is winning the opportunity*, the proposal is a key component of achieving this objective. A proposal can never be considered in isolation from the overall sales process. Therefore, the proposal should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of the sale.”
* Winning defined as award of contract, next stage, influence, etc. – as defined by sales.
As those of us who have been, “Tried by Proposals” know well, too often a proposal is looked at as separate and unrelated to the other components of a sale – the customer’s perception of the responder, previous interactions with the client, the client’s view of the competition, presentations (final and others), etc. It is critical that proposals always be tightly connected to the sales process. Anything less will reduce the impact and quality of the proposal. Failing to do this, you might get lucky and “win a battle”, but you’re sure to “lose the war.”
Posted by Jon on 22 January, 2010 under Processes & best practice |
Whilst presenting an APMP Foundation Level training course to a group before Christmas, I found myself getting frustrated by the negative spin that the examiners take on the “Learning review” process. What’s the point, according to the syllabus, of a lessons learnt process? It’s to “recognize systemic process issues and drive their resolution”; the aim is “to do better next time”.
It struck me that whoever developed this section of APMP’s competency framework must have had some pretty bad personal experiences running proposals. If the learning review is so negative – working from the assumption that so much went on that was wrong, that so many things need to be corrected – then it’s no wonder that it can be hard to secure people’s open, frank participation in the process. The working assumption underlying the “white review” would appear to be that the proposal team has just endured a soul-destroying journey into the valley of despair – and the inevitable risk is that those who do participate in the learning process will approach the exercise feeling defensive, confrontational and negative.
No, a learning review should be framed in a positive way. Look to celebrate what went well on the bid – those things you’d do again; the things that worked; the things you’d want other teams to try on their next proposal effort. And then – without attributing blame – look at what the team would have done differently (with the benefit of hindsight, even), or would want to approach in a different way the next time around. After all, even the most successful bids aren’t all plain sailing – and so many unsuccessful teams do so much cool stuff without quite getting across the finishing line in first place.
Posted by Jon on 18 January, 2010 under APMP & accreditation, Processes & best practice |
Whilst presenting an APMP Foundation Level training course to a group before Christmas, I found myself getting frustrated by the negative spin that the examiners take on the “Learning review” process. What’s the point, according to the syllabus, of a lessons learnt process? It’s to “recognize systemic process issues and drive their resolution”; the aim is “to do better next time”.
It struck me that whoever developed this section of APMP’s competency framework must have had some pretty bad personal experiences running proposals. If the learning review is so negative – working from the assumption that so much went on that was wrong, that so many things need to be corrected – then it’s no wonder that it can be hard to secure people’s open, frank participation in the process. The working assumption underlying the “white review” would appear to be that the proposal team has just endured a soul-destroying journey into the valley of despair – and the inevitable risk is that those who do participate in the learning process will approach the exercise feeling defensive, confrontational and negative.
No, a learning review should be framed in a positive way. Look to celebrate what went well on the bid – those things you’d do again; the things that worked; the things you’d want other teams to try on their next proposal effort. And then – without attributing blame – look at what the team would have done differently (with the benefit of hindsight, even), or would want to approach in a different way the next time around. After all, even the most successful bids aren’t all plain sailing – and so many unsuccessful teams do so much cool stuff without quite getting across the finishing line in first place.
Posted by Jon on 11 January, 2010 under Musings, Processes & best practice |
I just love this clip, from the BBC’s weekly round-up of technology news, ‘Click’. In it, reporter Dan Simmons ‘managed to break a mobile phone marketed as “unbreakable”, during a demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas’.
(Click here to watch the video on the BBC site).
Whilst this is merely a case of a product not performing quite to the advertised spec, I think it also serves as a healthy reminder that clients will sometimes check out the statements you make in your proposal. Clearly, proposal writers aim to put a positive spin on their organisation’s capabilities – but your claims do always need to be true, and capable of substantiation if queried or challenged.
Posted by Jon on 14 December, 2009 under Processes & best practice |
I read an article recently on ‘Design thinking’, the methodology that top designers IDEO deploy to come up with creative, excellent solutions to problems. It has five stages:
1) Immersion – ‘designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it’
2) Synthesis – where they ‘gather together their findings and look for patterns’
3) Ideation – brainstorming possible solutions
4) Prototyping – making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem, giving equal weight to each option
5) … and then moving on to build the product itself.
As the article explains, the process “takes the cliche of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow. Creativity, therefore, isn’t a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.”
There are huge parallels here to the ways we approach helping an organisation to improve its proposal capabilities – immersing ourselves in “how it’s done now”; assessing what works well and where the challenges and barriers may be, using our benchmarking model; identifying improvement options and testing the viability (and affordability) of different implementation approaches; building and agreeing a clear plan and helping with implementation as required.
The concept of a team is key, too. Certainly, BJ or I can and do work successfully alone on this type of exercise (as do the other quite excellent directors in our team). But the really high-energy, high-impact projects come when we have the chance to work together: comparing notes, sparking creative thoughts, challenging each other’s thinking, building on each other’s ideas.
Where there’s perhaps a different emphasis on the projects we deliver, compared to IDEO’s tack, is at their ‘prototyping’ stage. Most project sponsors (typically CEOs, COOs, Sales VPs, heads of sales ops) are so impatient to improve their proposals once they’ve engaged us that they tend to want to leap straight to conclusions and the plan. The article’s a welcome reminder – and useful proof point – of the need to hold back from ’solutioning’, if only for a short while, and to test various options carefully with the sponsors.
