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 Jon on 6 July, 2010 under Musings |
My travels for work took me to Brittany last month – a great group for the course, in a lovely part of the world. I had work to do most evenings, but writing whilst overlooking a picturesque harbour certainly beat being in the office!
I was staying in a small, family-run hotel: clean, comfortable but a little basic. I arrived at 9pm on the first evening of my stay, and the ever-so-friendly receptionist gave me a code for the front door – ‘just in case’ I needed it. I dropped my bags in my room, set straight off for dinner – and returned an hour or so later to find the hotel in darkness, the front door locked. Thank goodness I’d remembered the code – and thank goodness my plane hadn’t been delayed on the way in!
So here’s a debate: when does – and when should – your proposal centre ‘lock its door’ on a bid on which you’ve been working?
Many proposal teams engage with the sales team purely up to the moment at which a document is delivered. Some recognise the value of staying engaged until the team presents the proposal to the customer. Many support the bid effort throughout endless rounds of clarification and negotiation, struggling to disengage and even risking being dragged into transition and delivery!
In our desire to be helpful and to win business, there’s certainly a danger that some proposal folks stay involved too long. Certainly, salespeople will try to keep you on board for as long as they can: after all, you make their lives easier. But we’re not there as comfort blankets for account managers or for the team who are responsible for designing and implementing your offer.
The optimal point of disengagement depends – to an extent – on the skillset within your team, on where you can add the most value with the capacity / headcount you have available, and on the definition and perception of your role within the business. For me, the default ‘door shutting’ moment for a proposal team is the proposal presentation – I think the continuity that we bring at such a critical stage, helping to translate the written book into a powerful presentation and helping to coach and rehearse the team, are hugely important. But after that? It’s time to lock the door and give the salesperson the code for use in emergencies.
After I’d stumbled through the front door of the hotel after dinner in near-total darkness, searching in vain for a light switch and struggling up the stairs to my room, I also reflected that there are good ways and bad ways of handling the proposal team’s disengagement from the bid. You need to communicate clearly up front, and then to handle your exit professionally and in line with expectations – you don’t want to leave the team with whom you’ve been working feeling suddenly unloved, or thinking that you’re abandoning them!
Posted by BJ on 1 July, 2010 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!
Posted by Jon on 29 June, 2010 under Interviews and the Panel |
The recent news of the merger between leading proposal software providers Sant and Kadient has provoked much discussion within the proposal profession. I thought this would be an interesting topic, to explore further, so took some time out at the APMP Conference at the start of June to pose a few questions to Brian Vass – Vice President, Marketing for The Sant Corporation.
JW – So, the obvious question: why the merger? What’s in it for your two companies – and your customers?
BV – There are a lot of synergies between our product families and organizations that made the merger an ideal marriage. Our customers will benefit from everything the two companies have to offer – technology, people, and an incredible depth of expertise. They now have access to a broader set of capabilities from a single vendor to address what their sales team needs throughout the sales cycle.
Customers will also benefit from:
• Our commitment to customer satisfaction through the “Customer for Life” program
• Access to an online Customer Community to share ideas, best practices, and locate implementation resources
• Opportunity to attend an annual customer conference
JW – Any views yet on which products will survive into the long run – or how you’ll decide that? Surely one of your aims must be to rationalise and pick the “best of the best” of the two product sets?
BV – As a combined company, our commitment is to provide our customers the very best of each of our solutions for RFP and proposal creation, sales content management, and the strategic delivery of that content through sales playbooks. Our Product Management team is working on an integrated product strategy that will incorporate the best of both offerings. For now, it’s “business as usual” for our customers.
JW – It’s always seemed as though the two companies have spurred each other on in the race to develop their respective product sets. Long-run, will the loss of competitive pressure result in a slowdown in the pace of development?
BV – We still face competition in the market and we anticipate new competitors to emerge. Regardless, we develop products that meet the needs of our customers. We capture feedback through our customer community, focus groups, surveys, annual conference, and daily interactions. Our commitment to providing customer-driven product upgrades, on a timely basis, will not change as a result of the merger.
JW – The new company: focused on proposals / RFPs – or on sales collateral more broadly?
BV – All of the above. We remain fully committed to provide solutions that arm sales professionals to:
• Automate the creation of client-focused proposals, RFP responses, and presentations
• Quickly and easily locate, personalize, and deliver their company’s best sales and marketing content
• Access situation-specific coaching through electronic “sales playbooks” within their CRM system. The playbooks guide the sales person through the steps of the sales cycle and provide links to relevant content & advice.
JW – Bitter rivals suddenly becoming best friends. How are the people in your respective teams getting on now they’re on the same side of the table?
BV – We’re getting on surprisingly well. It’s been strange at times sharing our sales pipelines, product roadmap, marketing strategies, and other internal gems. But we’re making our company better by taking the best practices from each organization. And everyone is motivated to be the largest provider of sales enablement solutions in the marketplace.
JW – And finally – what will be the name of the merged company?
BV – Kadient and Sant will operate under their existing names until a rebranding project is completed later this year. Stay tuned!
Many thanks to Brian for taking the time to share his views. If you have any thoughts or questions regarding the merger, do add your comments to this post!
Posted by Jon on 22 June, 2010 under Musings |
After flirting over the years with various newspapers – most notably The Independent and The Guardian – I’ve recently gone back to The Times. I love its writing – crisp, original, providing enough detail to make you feel well-informed without leaving you overwhelmed with information. Just like a good proposal, I guess.
But its structure? Oh my goodness! Inserted inside the main paper last Friday was the “Arts & Ents” section. Inside that: the “Mindgames” supplement. Next came “Bricks & Mortar”. Inside that – in this bizarre Russian doll of a newspaper – “the game”, their soccer update (its title in supposedly-trendy lower-case). Inside that – a separate listing of the coming season’s football fixtures. None of these were separately bound or stapled, you understand – just six different sections within the overall paper, needing to be separated out from one another before any individual component could be enjoyed without interruption.
I can guess where the problem arises: each area of content doubtless has its own editor who wants the glory of a separate section rather than seeing their material blended coherently into the overall document. And production lead times may play a part, too. But the result is a total mess – feeling like it’s structured for the writers rather than the readers. And there’s a lesson in that for those of us who develop proposals.
Posted by BJ on 18 June, 2010 under Proposal Guys news, Word play & writing |
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.)
Posted by Jon and BJ on under Proposal Guys news |
Those of you who’ve met us at conferences or courses will know that we’re not usually the quietest of people… and so you might have been a bit surprised by the lack of posts here since the APMP session in Florida at the start of the month.
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
