• 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.

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.

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!

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.

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…?

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”.

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!

As was the case for the cartoon caption contests* we ran at the annual APMP conferences the past two years, we would have posted the finalists immediately upon returning from the conference. This year I wasn’t able to do so because someone** wasn’t thinking and packed up the responses with the rest of the material from our booth and shipped it back to the Strategic Proposals US offices.

The materials have finally arrived here in our offices and I’m now able to provide the finalist entries and have our readers vote on them.

We received quite a few responses at the conference and, not surprisingly, many of them hit very close to home. Also not surprisingly, many of these (about 20 or so) were related to extensions (I.e. “He didn’t see the notice that they had given us an extension”. John S.) and the turnaround time (“I just asked him to reread the entire thing before we submit it…in 20 minutes.” Tom L.) Another favorite topic was the impending deadline/due date (See one of the finalist entries.) A somewhat surprising topic was pizza (“I just told him they were out of pepperoni.” Submitted by Neil E.). We even had a Disney related entry (see honorable mentions.)

As it is each year, it was tough to come up with the finalists but, after much debate, lobbying and a bit of whining, we were able to come up with an agreed top three entries.

Our two honorable mentions are –

“When did his eyes start bleeding?” (Chris J.)
“He can’t find his Mickey ears.” (Alexandra M-J)

Our three finalists (in alphabetical order of the last name of the submitter) are –

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.)

You can cast your vote (one per reader) by sending an e-mail with the subject line “Cartoon Caption Contest” and stating within your mail the number of the entry for which you wish to vote. Please send your mail to bj@strategicproposals.com. We’ll collect votes for one week from the date of this post and then announce the winner.

*We ran our first Cartoon Caption Contest in 2008. This contest is based on and modeled after the long running and very popular cartoon caption contest done by the New Yorker magazine. Entries are submitted, from which three finalists are chosen. The readership then votes for their favorite and a winner is determined based on receiving the largest number of votes.
For each contest, Jon and I come up with an idea for a cartoon and then this is developed and drawn by Mike Parkinson of 24 Hour Company. The cartoon is distributed to conference participants and they then submit their entry (or entries, as participants may submit as many ideas as they wish) and we post it on a board at the conference. Participants at the conference tell us they really enjoy seeing the ideas of their fellow members.

**Okay, I admit it. I was the one to put them in the box. But those supporting me should have known to check to see if I had, yet another, bright idea that wasn’t quite thought through and which needed to be corrected.)

We’ve just worked out that although we’ve been posting merrily away, and the control panel for the site was claiming that all was well, our posts haven’t actually been showing up on the site.

Everything’s now fixed, and normal service is resumed – and we’ll now re-publish the entries that should have appeared over the past few weeks. Sorry for the radio silence!

Best wishes

Jon & BJ

We’ve reproduced the policy below, for two reasons – first, because we’d welcome any feedback or views as we strive lead our own operations in a more environmentally-friendly manner, and second to challenge readers here to produce their own policies. Here’s what we’ve committed to doing – and do let us know your plans:

Strategic Proposals Environmental Policy

Strategic Proposals seeks to achieve excellence in every aspect of our business and to champion best practice within the proposal profession.

As such, we are committed to minimising the environmental impact of our operations and to encouraging other proposal teams to do likewise.

To achieve this, we have adopted the following ten step policy across each of our business units worldwide. We will:

1. Seek to off-set the carbon emissions associated with our business travel, embedding this within our standard terms of engagement.
2. Minimise international travel as far as possible whilst meeting our client’s business needs, by working with and promoting local partner companies within the Strategic Proposals International Network.
3. Use public transport rather than private vehicles wherever possible.
4. Use materials from sustainable sources (e.g. FSC-compliant) for all of our printed documentation and training course materials.
5. Reduce paper usage, by adopting and advocating duplex (double-sided) printing for all proposal-related activity and recycling all redundant paper from bidding and training programmes.
6. Promote an environmentally responsible approach to print and production within the training and advice that we provide to clients, and in our written articles and conference presentations.
7. Incorporate a specific section on environmental best practice within the Strategic Proposals Benchmarking Model, by the end of 2010.
8. Sponsor an annual award, to be offered to the proposal centre worldwide that, in our opinion, has done the most to reflect environmental best practice.
9. Communicate the importance of environmental issues to our staff, associates and business partners on a regular basis, encouraging feedback.
10. Annually review our environmental policies and performance, and allocate resources for their effective direction and implementation.

We welcome – and will actively seek – constructive feedback on our policy from our clients and others in the proposal profession.

Strategic Proposals, May 2010.