Posted by Jon on 31 August, 2010 under Processes & best practice | 
So, what’s the golden rule regarding fonts in proposals?
The received wisdom in the proposal profession – reflected in the APMP Foundation examination – is that one should use ‘serif’ fonts (such as Times New Roman) for body text, and a ‘sans serif’ font (such as Arial) for headings and captions. Having played with a few typefaces over the years – including some interesting experiments, setting out the same proposal in different fonts and gathering feedback from users – it’s always seemed like a fairly sensible guide.
Certainly, most designers tend to work primarily with sans serif fonts. They’re deemed easier to read at larger font sizes, and work well on short documents. And that’s where many corporate branding teams focus when mandating a ‘corporate font’: their practical experience revolves largely around brochures, adverts, websites, emails, letters – not on proposals, which are much longer. Yet I’ve worked with many top-notch designers who’ve seemed very cynical about the advice that one should switch over to a serif font for longer documents, and I’m far from sure that that’s merely ignorance on their part.
So, I decided recently to look for the underlying evidence to support the two sides of the debate. That took me to a fascinating article by Alex Poole, entitled “Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces?”. Alex explains that “An argument has been raging for decades within the scientific and typographic communities on what seems a very insignificant issue: Do serifs contribute to the legibility of typefaces, and by definition, are sans serif typefaces less legible? To date, no one has managed to provide a conclusive answer to this issue.”
He talks through various typographical definitions in detail, then “reviews the evidence for and against the legibility of serif and sans serif typefaces”, drawing extensively on various academic studies of the issue. And his conclusion?
What initially seemed a neat dichotomous question of serif versus sans serif has resulted in a body of research consisting of weak claims and counter-claims, and study after study with findings of “no difference”. Is it the case that more than one hundred years of research has been marred by repeated methodological flaws, or are serifs simply a typographical “red herring”?
It is of course possible that serifs or the lack of them have an effect on legibility, but it is very likely that they are so peripheral to the reading process that this effect is not even worth measuring. Indeed, a greater difference in legibility can easily be found within members of the same type family than between a serif and a sans serif typeface. There are also other factors such as x-height, counter size, letter spacing and stroke width which are more significant for legibility than the presence or absence of serifs.
Finally, we should accept that most reasonably designed typefaces in mainstream use will be equally legible, and that it makes much more sense to argue in favour of serif or sans serif typefaces on aesthetic grounds than on the question of legibility.
So maybe, just maybe, the ‘standard’ proposal convention is less robust that it might appear. Certainly, I’ll be less forceful with corporate branding folks having reviewed the article than I’ve sometimes been in the past. But it doesn’t shake me from my belief that the best way to choose a font for your proposal is to make sure it’s one with which the evaluators would feel comfortable, and potentially to print samples of the document in different fonts and canvass opinion on which is easiest to read and most attuned to your story and brand.
Posted by BJ on 29 July, 2010 under Processes & best practice |
No, this entry isn’t about the Queen’s kind of subjects such as Jon and his fellow countrymen (or if you need me to be politically correct, country persons) but the kind in the line at the top of a mail referred to quite cleverly as the “subject line”.
I recently had a call from someone who informed me that I hadn’t answered a mail from her which she sent several days prior. She told me this mail was quite important and she asked why I hadn’t read or responded. When I asked her for the subject line so I could check on this she said it “Meeting on Tuesday cancelled”.
Well, I had received a mail regarding Tuesday’s meeting, with the subject line Meeting on Tuesday, opened it, read it and responded to it. I then put the date and time in my calendar (the sender hadn’t used an ‘invite’).
I then subsequently received a mail with the subject line “Tuesday meeting cancelled”. Again, I opened this mail, read it and responded to it. I then deleted the date and time from my calendar.
When I received the second mail with the subject line “Tuesday meeting cancelled I. quite logically in my opinion, ignored it. After all, I’d already read and responded to it. I assumed, again I think quite logically, assumed it had inadvertently been sent a second time.
Most of us receive an incredible amount of mail. Most of us also receive an incredible amount of mail that is “just so much noise”. In our workshops, Jon and I talked about the need for a good proposal strategy to “cut through the noise level.” It’s the same with mail. Want me to read it? Make sure the subject line is appropriate and informative.
A few tips on what makes for an effective subject line –
• Be specific as to the topic “Meeting to discuss next steps on project XYZ. Please confirm intention to attend.”
• Be clear and specific. I.e. “Confirming my intention to attend Tuesday meeting.”
• Let the receiver know if there is action required, “Decision on purchase of XX. Action required.”
• If it’s not a priority or essential. “Meeting notes. FYIF* – if/when you can get to” it.”
*For your information/files
Posted by Jon on 27 July, 2010 under Processes & best practice |
My previous post got the ball rolling on a list of thoughts on the qualification process. As promised, here are the rest of my “baker’s dozen” hints and tips:
- Use simple, memorable qualification criteria. We advocate four: “is it real, do we want it, can we win it, can we do it?” Pretty much all of the more detailed discussions you’ll need to have can be categorised under one of those headings – and there’s real power in having a qualification mantra that everyone involved in bidding understands and can repeat.
- Make sure your process has teeth. It’s not uncommon for me to be assured by a client during a benchmarking exercise that they do indeed have a qualification process – often a time-consuming and complex one at that. Yet when I ask what percentage of deals they qualified out of the previous year, they look blankly, and confess that it was a round number: 0.
- Treat the usual last-gasp tactics of salespeople (we can’t win, but we’ve got to bid because either “it’s strategic” or “if we don’t bid this time, we won’t be invited to bid on their next deal”) with healthy cynicism – even, perhaps, a degree of disdain. I’ve worked on bids that have fallen under those headings – but only after a particularly thorough review, and with a clear strategy as to what we’re going to do in our proposal, knowing that we won’t win and that doing so isn’t actually our goal.
- Be brave! Recognise that your qualification decision may change as the deal progresses – particularly, as you learn more about your competitive position. If something happens to convince you that you’re wasting your time, shout about it! Even on the most reliable airlines, flying the most modern planes, sometimes people need to listen to the safety announcements so that they know where to find the emergency exits!
- Subject to the above… make sure the client is always given a clear, consistent, early and honest view of your intent regarding whether or not you’re going to expect to bid.
- Handle any “no bid” decision extremely sensitively. Planning, scripting and rehearsing the feedback to the customer needs great care – as does coaching salespeople in how to handle the buyer’s likely objections (“but we do want you to bid: of course you can win” being shorthand for “if you drop out, you might compromise my purchasing process and / or my personal credibility internally”)
- Be clear on the role of the proposal manager in the process. Do you own the salesforce’s or business unit’s revenue target for the year? No? I thought not. So our role in helping those folks to achieve their goals is to offer advice from a proposal perspective (is it possible to produce an appropriate proposal in the timescales?), perhaps mixed with a sense of the deal’s “winnability” drawn from your bidding experience, perhaps blended with your ability to act as an excellent facilitator (and to be seen, perhaps, as an independent in the process, sitting ‘between’ the salespeople and the business). You have the right not to be expected to waste your time on lost causes. And yes, you may sometimes have to be the one that provokes the telling debate – given (1) above, salespeople are rarely the first people to jump up and say: “you know what – we shouldn’t go after this”. But, ultimately, it’s not your call.
Hope that helps. And I’d welcome your own experiences and advice if you’d care to leave a comment!
Posted by Jon on 20 July, 2010 under Processes & best practice |
The topic of qualification – the “bid / no bid” or “go / no go” decision – has raised its weary head in several recent conversations with clients. It’s also one of the cornerstones of the APMP accreditation syllabus.
So I’ve put together a “baker’s dozen” thoughts on the essence of a good qualification process, in the interests of helping you test your own approach. It’s not a comprehensive list, by any means, but if you’re doing all of this stuff well, your qualification process is probably in good shape. In the interests of keeping posts here from becoming too long, I’m going to split the comments across this post and my next one, which will appear here next week:
- Be conscious from the outset that to “no bid” runs counter to the instincts of most salespeople. They spend their life trying to hunt out opportunities to win business; they engage the prospect in dialogue about a specific contract; they start to convey your company’s appetite and capabilities for the work. And then they’re expected have to decide – admit, even – that it’s not a good deal for them to pursue? This is an area that needs handling with particular sensitivity.
- Treat every opportunity as “qualified out until it’s qualified in”, rather than the other way round. For too many organisations, “bid” (“qualified in”) is the default setting – causing the proposal centre to be seen by sales as a ‘business prevention’ unit when debates start as to whether or not to pull the plug on the opportunity. But if your role is seen as helping the salesperson to gain support, resources and funding for their bid, you’ll suddenly be “on their side”!
- In the words of the APMP Foundation Level exam: qualify early and certainly well before the customer’s requirements document arrives. Clearly, an RFP (or the equivalent) provides a host of new information about the opportunity and the customer’s specification. But by the time it arrives, you should at least have “in principle” approval to bid, subject to certain assumptions that you’ve made turning out to be true once you’ve reviewed the RFP. And that final post-RFP-receipt endorsement of your qualification decision needs to take place rapidly after the customer’s document has landed – the clock’s ticking, and you don’t want to sit around waiting for approval.
- Involve the right people in the debate. Ever experienced a situation when a qualification forum has agreed on a “no bid”, only for the sales staff to escalate the debate to a more senior level and to succeed in having the decision reversed? If they’re that important to your decision-making, make sure they’re directly involved.
- Make sure that if you do reach a “go” decision, that does result in the definite and timely provision of the resources needed to chase the deal. Particularly, those involved in the qualification decision need to feel a sense of personal commitment to the outcome – if you’re party to saying ‘yes’, there’s an onus on you to make sure that your area of the business then plays its full part in making the bid a success. And if the people who control the necessary resources aren’t involved in the qualification process, it can be tough to then secure their buy-in.
- For too many organisations, qualification is merely a hurdle for the salespeople to overcome: “score 40% or more on the checklist and you can bid”. Guess what? If that’s the game, your typical salesperson will engineer their score to be at least 43% (allowing a small margin of error for decency’s sake, and in case they get challenged on a couple of scoring criteria). Adopt what we term an ‘active qualification’ approach, in which you ask the salesperson not only how they’re currently scoring on an issue (e.g. “strength of relationship with the client’s decision-makers”), but what that score could be by the time the customer reaches the date on which they’ll make their decision – and what actions would need to be undertaken to improve their score, and hence their win probability.
As promised, more next time I post!
Posted by BJ on 8 July, 2010 under Processes & best practice |
I delivered a presentation recently. This was to a new organization whose abbreviation contains 4 letters. The person that asked me to present and provided the background information gave me these as TSRA (letters changed to hide the particular organization). The organization’s letters are in fact TRSA.
On the evaluation form, along with very positive comments such as, “Should have been the keynote.” “Bring him back and give him more time” “The most worthwhile presentation of the event” and the extremely high ratings (9.1 out of a possible 10), guess what many of the participants noticed and commented on.
You guessed it. A great many of the audience was distracted by the letters being in the incorrect sequence.
Another area where I missed a bit was the make up of the audience. I had been told the majority of the participants were part of or worked with “very large corporations”. I therefore targeted my presentation to that audience, with occasional references to smaller outfits. Guess who made up the majority of the audience.
Had I done a bit more homework, I would have hit the mark on both the initials and the audience and my score would have been that much higher and the comments cleaner*.
*Yes, I know the comments were very positive and the score was very high. As is the case with our work in proposals, Jon and I are always seeking to achieve the highest score and most positive feedback possible.
Posted by BJ on 22 April, 2010 under Musings, Processes & best practice |
I recently had a request from a couple of people asking me to send them a copy of our Proposal Professional’s Bill of Rights. That, combined with Jon’s recent posting of the APMP Code of Ethics prompted me to post the Bill of Rights here. (This was developed some years ago and was distributed (done in calligraphy on parchment no less!) at several APMP conferences.)
Please DO NOT copy this. If you’d like a copy, just send me mail with your ship to address and I’ll send you a copy. Thanks.
Posted by Jon on 6 April, 2010 under Processes & best practice |
Those of you who’ve studied common terminology and processes in the proposal profession will know of the proliferation of ‘colour reviews’ – a ‘blue’ team to review the win strategy, pink for proposal strategy and storyboards, gold for internal approvals, red for the final document review.
I’ve written in the past about my hatred of the unnecessary jargon that people create by using this ‘colour coding’ jargon, rather than easily-understandable names. But what’s really struck me lately is how the profession’s received wisdom actually misses out perhaps the most beneficial review stage of all.
See, in the process described above (and as reflected in the APMP accreditation scheme), there’s no formal review of content as it’s developed, between the storyboard and the final document. And, by the time the final document comes to be reviewed, it’s actually often too late to make too many substantial changes.
Where we’re often asked to work as peer reviewers is during the content development process: once a section or answer has reached a reasonably-advanced draft, we’ll look at it and see what works – and how it could be sharpened. That’s well before the content reaches the final proposal draft to be looked at by the ‘red team’ – and in good time for the contributors to take on board the feedback and rework their material.
Playing devil’s advocate at this stage can have a huge impact – constructively challenging each and every piece of content to suggest how the writing could be tightened and the customer focus increased. It’s not unreasonable to assume that a ‘bottom-up’ review of draft content like this can add least 10% to your score in the customer’s scoring (and often much more) – thus having a huge impact on where you’ll finish in the evaluation rankings.
And yet this form of peer review is missing from the standard ‘colour codings’: a missed opportunity by so many proposal teams!
