In an article published by the company, Melissa highlighted the role accreditation has played in the development of her company’s proposal group. She commented, “Just as an accountant should have a CPA and a lawyer needs to pass the Bar, our proposal professionals should be accredited and have the chance to participate in learning and development programs.”

In the article, Melissa also offers her views on ways to develop your team (and echoes many of the things Jon and I have stated and written about here in the blog). Here’s what Melissa advises:

• Recognize that each individual is different – with different skill sets, needs and interests.
• Understand the expectations for your group and consider ways you can coach and mentor.
• Join professional organizations (such as APMP) to stay abreast of best practices for your group or industry.
• Seek out training opportunities
• Don’t get too comfortable – There’s always something to learn!

Congratulations to Melissa on this prestigious award, on her promoting APMP accreditation and her obviously ‘getting it’ when it comes to the profession of proposals.

Like any survey, the more people that participate and the more data collected, the more powerful the results. That’s where you, our readers, come in. Please take the time to provide input to this survey. It’s similar to the previous salary surveys, with additional questions to address the 2008-2011 economic climate. The survey will run until the end of the year and we’ll provide highlights here on a regular basis.

We recognize that many of our readers reside outside the US and, as the survey requests input in US dollars, you will need to convert your currency into US dollars prior to providing the data. (You can access a converter here.)

According to Barbara the survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete. Clicking text at the end of the survey will take you to the contacts page to access real-time results. If you want to be notified when reports, presentations or articles from the survey are available, you can sign up to be placed on a mailing list (optional).

As always, the data from the survey is available for free to anyone who wants it and if you submit contact data it will NOT be shared or used for any other purpose.

The link to the survey is here and the survey results can be found here.

Jon and I hope that many of our readers will provide data to this important and very useful survey.

External focus

1. Be seen by the customer as the senior manager accountable for the bid – and ultimate successful delivery of the project
2. Drive strategy / plan for contact with senior-level customer contacts / influencers
3. Host / lead / contribute to client events as appropriate (e.g. meetings, visits, presentations)

Internal focus

1. Actively champion the importance of the opportunity – ensuring it’s viewed as a “Will Win” deal
2. Ensure relevant senior colleagues are appropriately briefed / consulted regarding the opportunity, and that their views are suitably reflected
3. Qualification: ensure that the deal is properly qualified in, with the resourcing plan fully understood and supported by all at senior levels
4. Secure the involvement of senior colleagues in the bid/proposal effort as required
5. Chair any regular bid/proposal reviews [not daily calls - more occasional overviews]
6. Provide active, visible support to the bid/proposal team – supporting with ideas, motivation etc.
7. Act as a point of escalation for any bid/proposal issues, including resourcing problems requiring resolution with / by senior colleagues
8. 8.     Participate in formal reviews as required – e.g. Strategy, Storyboard, “Red Team”
9. 9.     Approvals: provide senior-level bid approval – confirmation that the corporation is happy to submit, given clearly stated risks / assumptions, and is doing enough to win
10. 10.  Ensure learning points are identified via a Learning Review, and take accountability for reviewing recommended actions and ensuring a clear plan is in place for their implementation

I’d welcome others’ input via the comments!

This year’s theme, “The Art of Winning”, takes its inspiration from Sun Tzu’s famous book on military tactics, “The Art of War”, written some 2,500 years or so ago. Much as Machiavelli is my preferred evil source of reference for running proposals, it’s been great fun returning to Sun Tzu’s book having not read it for many years. I thought you might enjoy a few selected quotes, which seem particularly pertinent to those of us who write proposals.

1.       “Do not make war unless victory may be gained thereby; if there be prospect of victory, move; if there be no prospect, do not move.” (Qualify, folks!)
2.       “To be late, and hurrying to advance to meet the foe, is exhausting.” (Pre-proposal planning matters: let’s plan for success rather than merely responding to RFPs)
3.       “These things must be known by the leader: to know them is to conquer; to know them not is to be defeated.” (How clear are you with your sales teams on the information they need to dig out before you start work on a proposal?)
4.       “The army that conquers makes certain of victory, and then seeks battle. The army destined to defeat, fights trusting that chance may bring success to its arms.” (What a fabulous endorsement of the need to work out your proposal strategy before you start to write)
5.       “If a victory be gained by a certain stratagem, do not repeat it. Vary the stratagem according to the circumstances.” (We need a specific strategy for every opportunity – and simply cutting and pasting the Exec Summary from the last deal isn’t good enough!)
6.       “The wise man considers well both advantage and disadvantage. He sees a way out of adversity.” (That’s why the APMP accreditation syllabus puts so much emphasis on the Bidders’ Comparison Matrix)
7.       “In general, the procedure of war is: the Leader, having received orders from his lord, assembles the armies.” (Hey, we’re working for the sales organisation, right -  supporting them as they seek to win business. To an extent, we need to know our place).
8.       “As a rule, the soldiers prefer high ground to low. They prefer sunny places to those the sun does not reach.” (Yep, motivating the team’s pretty important)
9.       “Universal courage and unity depend on good management.” (Ever seen a dysfunctional proposal team, with everyone pulling in opposite directions…?!)
10.   “We create a situation which promises victory; but as the moment and method cannot be fixed beforehand, the plan must be modified according to the circumstances.” (How relevant to the ever-changing world of managing proposals)
11.   “If victory be certain from the military standpoint, fight, even if the lord forbid. If defeat be certain from the military standpoint, do not fight, even though the lord commands it.” (A controversial one, this – does it encourage rogue bidding? Not necessarily one I’d want to share with salespeople, but an interesting insight into their mindset!)
12.   “As has been said: “Know thyself; know the enemy; fear not for victory.” (That’s proposal strategy in a nutshell!)
13.   “To fight and conquer one hundred times is not the perfection of attainment, for the supreme art is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” (Hey, if we can avoid getting into a competitive tendering process in the first place – writing pro-active proposals, especially seeking to renew existing contracts, then so much the better)
14.   “He who does not employ a guide, cannot gain advantage from the ground.”  (Training for all participants; coaching; mentoring – all key to success)

It promises to be a great conference: if you’re lucky enough to be attending, do come and say hi!

As I was discussing with David and my brother Ken the parallels to proposal preparation – getting started well before the RFP was released – my brother asked, “And did you notice what David did first?”

“David began by clearing the kitchen counter, emptying the trash and checking the edge on my knives.” (David hadn’t brought his own knives and was using Ken’s, which he found to be somewhat dull. Ken brought out his knife sharpener and David sharpened each of the knives.)

We discussed this parallel to proposals. Rather than jumping into things, David took the time to prepare his work area and his tools. Having the proper tools and an appropriately set up work space allowed David to then focus on the task at hand, rather than having to repeatedly stop to find a tool or to make room to work.

It is the same with proposal development.. Those who have an appropriate space in which to work and the necessary equipment and tools, are able to focus on the task at hand – developing and are able to work much more effectively and efficiently…resulting in higher-impact, higher-quality responses.

On a recent Saturday morning, I stopped in to say hi to my brother Ken and his family. My brother-in-law, David was also visiting, from Las Vegas, where he is a head chef at one of the major hotels (the hotel is named after those tall trees with really long trunks that line the streets of Palm Beach and such places.).

Ken and his wife were having a dinner party that night, with David preparing the meal. Guests were due to arrive at 6pm and dinner, a Mexican meal with fare such as empanadas and carnitas, was planned for 7:15pm.

As we were sitting at the table finishing a late breakfast, about 11:15am or so, David looked at his watch and said, “Well, if I guess I’d better get started on dinner.”

What? Start preparations on a dinner some 8+ hours before it was due to served?

When I asked him why he was starting so early, David listed all he had to do, in which it needed to be done, and how long each task would take, in order to prepare the meal. As he spoke, his experience with meal preparation was immediately obvious. IT was also obvious he had a concern for preparing the best meal possible. David is as passionate about food and cooking as Jon and I are about proposals.

David pointed out that it was possible to prepare a meal in a much shorter period of time, but the quality would definitely suffer. He would have to take short cuts, wouldn’t be able to pay as much attention to detail and he might even miss an ingredient or two, which had happened many times before when he rushed or hadn’t had enough time. He said the time put into the preparation of a meal was always evident in the quality of the meal served.

As I listened to him, I realized the parallel to proposal development. Those groups that understand what needs to be done and allow enough time, getting started as early as possible and as needed, operate in much the same way as David does. These groups know what needs to be done. They don’t cut corners and they pay attention to the details.

They produce high-impact, high-quality responses and they do so in an efficient manner.

Those groups that don’t get started until the RFP is released, or worse, after some time has elapsed since the RFP was released, inevitably produce a much poorer quality response and doing so is much more difficult and stressful.

Great proposals, like great meals, require time to prepare and the way to have enough time is to, as David did for this dinner, get started well before the meal – the response – was to be served.

Customers then often take forever to make their purchasing decision – prevaricating for weeks and months, often going through an exhaustive process of clarification and negotiation. And even once they’ve appointed their chosen supplier, it may not be appropriate to seek detailed feedback on your proposal until the dust has settled, or until (if you’ve won the deal) implementation is safely underway. The prevailing ‘best practice’ would therefore be that the team needs to revisit their learning once they’ve captured the customer’s feedback – again, a sound principle to follow.

Working with a team in Madrid a while ago, one of the participants made the interesting point that there should probably be a third learning review, say six months after you’ve on a deal. Too often, when projects are delivered, they fail to meet the customer’s expectations or the supplier’s goals; the two organisations’ respective teams struggle to make sense of what was documented and agreed during the bid process. Perhaps it’s a case of “It doesn’t do what it says on the can”, or maybe simply “We hadn’t fully understood or anticipated that”.

Understanding whether this has been the case is critical – and diagnosing anything that could have been done differently in the bid or proposal to prevent the issues from occurring strikes me as crucial. And for those projects that are a resounding success? Again, clear assessment of what went well – and communication of why this was – could add huge value to the organisation.

I thought it was a fascinating point, and it’s one I think I’ll emphasise rather more in future when working with teams who are looking to learn and to improve.

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?

During the event, we announced the winners of the UKAPMP Proposal Design competition, which we’d sponsored. There were several contenders for the award – including Arqiva, Bid Management Services, BidPerfect, Canon, Colt, DocumentGenie, Lloyds Banking Group and Siemens Enterprise Communications – and some truly excellent entries.

The prize was captured by Lloyds Banking Group – and Andy Lyons is seen here on the left receiving the trophy from Strategic Proposals’ Consulting Director, Graham Ablett:

The cover of their winning entry – a proposal submitted to Commerzbank – is below (reproduced with permission):

Andy also shared another of their proposals with us, and I thought the front cover of that one (to brewer Fullers – main product, London Pride beer – was even better):

Congratulations to all of the entrants. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a similar competition at the APMP worldwide conference? Perhaps I should chat to the organisers…?

We’re currently conducting a survey capturing the views of bid and proposal managers around the world, to be fed back to the purchasing community. (Free copies will, of course, be sent to anyone who participates in the survey).

If you’d like to add your voice to the debate, please download the survey form (in Letter or A4 format) and email your contribution (in Word, or scanned if you’d rather complete it by hand) to info@strategicproposals.com by 30 November.

We’re already had contributions from the Dubai, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK & US, and more. But the more folks who participate, the more weight our messages will carry back to the procurement community. Thanks for your input!