Posted by Jon under Musings, Proposal Guys news | 
Last month, BJ and had some fun during our keynote opening the second day of the UKAPMP conference by finding out about the group’s collective experience. With 200-odd people in the room, our spot survey revealed that between us:
- 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.
Posted by Jon under Musings, Proposal Guys news |
I’ve been travelling pretty extensively lately, spending four nights at home in the past four weeks, amidst extended work trips to locations including Egypt and Malaysia. In Kuala Lumpur over the weekend prior to running an APMP Foundation course, I browsed Time Out (the listings magazine) looking for somewhere good to eat.
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.
Posted by Jon under Proposal Guys news |
We want your money! Not for ourselves, you understand (although that’s always nice!), but for an even better cause.
Our colleague Richard Jenkins is bravely making a parachute jump on 29 June in aid of Help for Heroes, the charity that helps wounded ex-services personnel.
Many of you will know Richard, from his work with us at Strategic Proposals or through his APMP activities (including his spell as last year’s Chief Exec of UKAPMP). This is a charity that’s particularly close to my heart, and I’m delighted he’s chosen to raise funds for them; the Strategic Proposals team here in the UK has already pledged a £1,000 contribution to support him.
Please, please do consider sponsoring him – we’d be extremely grateful for any contributions, no matter how small or large. You can click here to make a donation. Thank you!
Posted by Jon under Proposal Guys news |
As you may have seen in a previous post, we’ve been running a survey over the past quarter into bid/proposal managers’ views of the RFPs that we receive from buyers. We’ve had a fantastic response to this, with significant numbers of contributors from across the world.
Our Dutch colleagues have now created an online version of the survey form, and we’ve extended the deadline until the end of December. So if you’d like your voice to be heard, please do click here and complete the survey online.
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 BJ under Proposal Guys news |
Just what I need, Jon getting even more attention than he already does. As if he needs anymore.
I imagine those of you who receive and have seen/read the latest edition of the “Journal of the Association of Proposal Management” – aka “The Journal” – know to what I’m referring. This edition devotes not one or two but nine full pages to an interview with Jon. (A picture of him lounging poolside at a hotel in Bangalore India is also prominently displayed along side the table of contents.)
The interview, titled “Talk Time with Jon Williams”, was conducted and written by R. Dennis Green, a management consultant, writer, practitioner and fellow APMP Fellow. He’s also the founder of the Proposal Management Journal and a friend.
If you’ve read the article, you’ll know that it provides great insights into how my buddy Jon thinks and his approach to proposals and purchasing. And, as will be know surprise to those of you who know Jon or are regular readers of this blog, Jon is not short of opinions and doesn’t pull any punches.
Dennis gave me a chance to offer some insights into what it’s like to be Jon’s partner ad friend, so for a rare change, I managed to get a word in edgewise.
If you’ve already read the article, I suspect you’ve mentioned it others, especially those who k now Jon or have seen him present. And if you haven’t read the article, I strongly suggest you do. You’re sure to come away with some great tips, new thinking and a greater appreciation for “the other proposal guy”.
Posted by BJ under Proposal Guys news, Word play & writing |
The results for the Third Annual Strategic Proposals Cartoon Caption Contest are now in. I imagine you’d like to know which entry won, right?
Well, as this is a blog entry related to an APMP event and not a proposal, I’m going to take license and violate the proposal rule that says you should lead with the headline, in this case the headline being the winning entry.
But just announcing the winner without a bit of background, which I hope would create a bit of dramatic tension, wouldn’t be any fun now would it?
I suspect some of you would like to see the cartoon again. So, here it is –
And the finalists’ entries were –
1. “Can’t your family go to Hawaii without you?” (Anita F.)
2. “Who knew a 14:00 deadline meant 2pm?” (Gregg K.)
3. “Just because the client makes computer chips and not potato chips?” (Cynthia M.)
We received a great many entries. Some of these were as simple as “#3”. Others add a little bit of insight, such as “I can really relate to #2, so I vote for that entry.” And quite a few apparently had the need to share their pain, such as “I have experienced the very same thing as alluded to by #1. Here’s what happened to me. I was working on a proposal and … (and then included very specific details as to this person’s experience.)
We tabulated the entries, had the resulted reviewed by an accounting firm (ok, what I really did was ask bookkeeper check my addition) and then sealed the final result in an envelope (not sure why we did that but it seemed the right thing to do.)
The winner of the Third Annual Strategic Proposals Cartoon Caption Contest is (please feel free to provide your own drum roll here), #2 ““Who knew a 14:00 deadline meant 2pm?” submitted by Greg Kulichik.
Please join me in congratulating Greg and the other finalists (In this case, unlike proposals, all three places have their reward – bragging rights for submitting very clever answers.
Jon and I say thanks to everyone who participated. As has been the case for each of the contests, we received some very clever entries, with Greg’s being voted this year’s cleverest!
