Posted by Jon under Processes & best practice | 
In a recent conversation with a sales director, he noted that that most of their organisation’s bids were made face-to-face with the client, using PowerPoint – invariably resulting in the deal being won. What value, therefore, could professional proposal staff bring to their sales process? It led to an interesting debate, and I thought I’d share my perspectives here.
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?
Posted by Jon under Processes & best practice, Proposal Guys news |
The APMP conference in South Africa last week was the second major event I’d addressed in the space of a week – following hard on the heels of what, to my mind, was the best-ever UKAPMP annual conference. (Huge congratulations to Ken Erskine, France Campbell and the team for attracting 270 delegates to the two-day session).
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…?
Posted by Jon under Processes & best practice |
What do bidders think of buyers – and, particularly, of the RFPs we receive?
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!
Posted by Jon under Processes & best practice |
When the answers to the four questions that make up the qualification mantra – “Is it real, do we want it can we win it, can we do it?” – are “no”, salespeople often resort to an alternative attempt to justify proceeding with the bid…
“But it’s strategic!”
What does that mean in practice? Typically, they’re stating that – to paraphrase Baron de Coubertin – it’s the taking part that matters, not the winning. I can think of five potential scenarios to justify an “it’s strategic” bid – one where a rational evaluation of the usual questions would otherwise cause you to down tools:
1. Known future opportunity. We can’t meet the customer’s requirements or we know they won’t choose us. However, we can demonstrate that losing this – but doing so extremely professionally – will help us to capture a specific, known future piece of business with this customer.
Before heading down this route, be clear on what that future opportunity is and when it’s happening – specifics here, not “we think they’ll have stuff for us at some point”. And do a careful analysis of how this tactic will enhance your reputation with the client. The “pro’s” come potentially from the opportunities that arise to develop relationships through face-to-face bid discussions, from showing you can develop high-quality proposals and (potentially) from conditioning the client’s views / requirements for that future deal. The “con’s” are that being branded “unrealistic” or “losers” isn’t always a positive place to be.
2. Recovering credibility. Previous bid engagements with the client concerned have been a disaster. They think we’re unprofessional, inept, and don’t think we see them as an important client. They’ve extended an olive branch to us – and if we “no bid” this time, or bid badly, we’ll never be invited back.
Submitting and presenting an excellent proposal is part of a clear, wider plan to restore our reputation and re-establish positive personal connections with their decision-makers. We can’t meet their requirements this time, however, but we can share experience and insights that will help their project to succeed, and could potentially offer a non-compliant solution as a “fall-back” option should their “plan A” fail.
3. Market penetration. We have a new product, service or solution; perhaps we’re in a new country or new sector; maybe we’ve built up a relationship with an entirely new customer. We need to be seen as “players” and hence taking part – even if we don’t win – is key to building relationships and establishing our brand in the new area.
And we’re in stages one or two of the three-stage journey in customers’ inevitable progression from viewing us as “new, interesting and creative” to “we know they’re serious contenders in this market” to “they’ve been trying for ages and they never win – they’re risky”.
4. Competitive attack. We know we can’t win, but we’re not prepared to let competitors (and especially the incumbent) have a clear run at this. We’re going to bid, potentially at very low prices, to unsettle our competitors’ and (potentially) stop them making excessive profits from the deal – despite the risk that they’ll then do the same to us, and margins in the market as a whole will end up being degraded.
5. Desperation. The salesperson can’t answer “yes” to each of the four key qualification questions, but believes there’s a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. There’s not much else in his/her pipeline (“I’ve not got anything better to do”), and they need to show that they’re busy. He/she would love to bid, as miracles do sometimes happen – particularly, if bidding comes at little or no personal cost (in other words, other people will do all of the hard work).
Of these, four tactics may potentially be viable justifications – provided it’s agreed clearly, in advance, that “losing well” is the goal – and that the bid / proposal strategies reflect this. The fifth, and the one that seems to be most prevalent, certainly isn’t an acceptable justification for proceeding with a bid – taking effort and energy away from other deals with a more realistic chance of success. Try forcing the salesperson to explain which of the other four scenarios their deal fits into – and be (friendly and supportive yet) robust in your challenges. Life it too short to be wasted working on no-hope proposals.
PS click here and then here if you want to read a previous thread on the qualification process
Posted by Jon under Musings, Processes & best practice |
When we survey buyers to find what they see as the characteristics of a good proposal, “a logical structure” always comes near the top of their wish list – never mind that their RFPs are often so illogically organised as to make responding in a coherent way nigh on impossible!
I was reminded of this recently whilst staying in an ever-so-trendy new hotel in the Middle East – part of an international chain, clearly keen to impress its guests and win awards by making everything as cool as possible. I’d finished running the first day of a two-day course, and decided it’d be good to go for a dip in the hotel’s pool. But where to find it in the hotel? I knew it was described on their website as a “rooftop pool” – yet I also knew that I’d been to the top floor of the hotel the previous evening, eaten in the lovely bar, and seen neither sight nor sound of anywhere to swim.
Time, I thought, to consult the hotel’s directory. Being new and slick and modern, my room didn’t offer me anything so old-fashioned as a booklet of information – everything I might need to know being on their lovely interactive online system. I fished around to find where I’d hidden the remote control (how *had* it ended up so far under the bed?), flicked on the TV, and loaded the menu. And here were the choices that faced me:
Arrive
Awake
Eat and drink
Amuse
Asleep
Away
Abuzz
A-list
“Swimming pool”, perchance? No such luck. I guessed at “amuse” or “abuzz”, but neither of those contained anything remotely helpful – so, in frustration, I gave up and phoned reception.
I was left reflecting on the triumph of style over substance – both the format and the structure of the content doubtless making so much sense to the hotel’s design team – but being useless, frustrating, frankly downright annoying for their customers. Like, dare I say, a fair number of proposals…
Posted by Jon under Processes & best practice |
I’ve been travelling pretty extensively for work of late. So much of the core of proposal management ‘best practice’ is common around the world, but I always find it fascinating to uncover the subtleties associated with bidding in different countries and cultures.
Take a recent trip to Abu Dhabi. Flicking through a local paper at dinner one evening, my eyes were drawn to an advert announcing an ITT for an engineering project to be delivered for a public sector body.
And there, in the write-up, amidst the format of the proposals they’d require and the submission dates, was a quite fascinating phrase:
Deadline for buying tender documents
Yep, you read that right: ‘buying’. A rough mental calculation showed that bidders were expected to pay the equivalent of around USD 1,000 to the client’s Contracts & Tenders Department for the priviledge of participating. Discussions with the team on the course revealed that this was common practice locally.
Even the most experienced international purchasers to whom I’ve mentioned this since have been astonished and quite dismayed! But hey, it’d certainly focus minds during the qualification process if a ‘go’ decision involved writing a cheque to the prospect, on top of any internal bid costs!
Posted by Jon 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.
